


The Complacency of the Fucked

by Opacifica



Series: After Meat, Aftermath. [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Earth C (Homestuck), F/F, I Heard You Like Epilogues, Kissing, M/M, Metatextual Bullshit, Questions Will Be Answered, References to The Notebook (2004), So I Wrote An Epilogue To Your Epilogue So You Can Epilogue While You Epilogue, The Homestuck Epilogues, The Homestuck Epilogues: Meat, You Know That Sort Of Thing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2020-06-27 03:54:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 50,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19782721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opacifica/pseuds/Opacifica
Summary: Transcend, forget, remember, heal, make out with your hot media theory classmate if you can summon up the chutzpah. Vriska is there. Earth C and most of its gods have a lot of healing to do. Jake is excited to be included. One story ends, and life, in its infinite complexity, goes on.What happens after the conclusion of The Grand Battement of the Learned? Well, this.





	1. Dave: Finish The Notebook.

Dave: Finish The Notebook.

You’ve been to Karkat’s room a solid dozen times before, so you had a set of expectations walking in from the blizzard. Most are immediately fulfilled; he snarls and demands that you take your boots off outside, practically rips your parka off your shoulders to stuff it into his closet to preserve the integrity of his meticulously neat floors as though he expects you to shake the snowmelt off like a golden retriever fresh out of a mud puddle.

The impulse to tell him all of that in no uncertain terms is interrupted by just how different everything is set up from your typical bro-fest movie nights with John.

His fold-out couch is tucked in the corner, and he’s stripped the duvet from his bed to spread it on the floor. He sleeps with a frankly inhuman number of pillows - like, six, on a run-of-the-mill twin XL, the absolute madman - and he’s set them with deliberate carelessness in a sort of semicircle around his laptop. Two battery-powered lanterns illuminate the room with a soft, golden glow, entirely unlike the harsh fluorescent dorm lighting you’ve grown used to in the last four years.

“Woah,” you say, once you’ve been divested of most of your outerwear, pausing to hang your scarf on one of the neatly-arranged command hooks attached to his closet door. “I just brought, uh, some candy and shit?”

You produce the spoils of your last-minute trip to CVS before he can respond. Four different types of candy, the product of a four-for-four-dollars sale, because a Lalonde does not pass up a goddamned bargain, even if CVS is making you complicit in highway robbery, practically paying you to take the swedish fish off their hands. You got three different kinds of microwavable popcorn, which was not on sale, because you weren’t sure which kind he likes, and it’d be a square move to _ask_ , plus a bottle of apple juice for you. You’re only human.

The receipt is as long as he is tall, mostly thanks to coupons for like, 20% off Clinique face wash or whatever, though he objects semi-violently as you try to demonstrate.

“Get your grubby hands off me,” he complains, stalking off with the swedish fish. “And these things are fucking disgusting. What’s _wrong_ with you?”

“Aw,” you say, “really incredible how much unbridled rage you can fit in a CVS-receipt of Karkat. A triumph of modern efficiency, unlike the receipt itself, which is just kinda sad. I mean, how many trees went into this thing? Oh, yeah, and what’s wrong with me is a terminal fucking condition called ‘too cool for school’, which makes my presence on this campus an exercise in agony, and yes, my Gofundme is linked in my Twitter bio if you want to show your support.”

“Please tell me you’re going to shut up during the movie,” Karkat snaps. “It’s really nuanced, you’ll miss shit if you’re riffing constantly.”

“Just getting it out of my system,” you reassure him, grinning. “Got a lot of great material here.”

He notices you glancing at the lanterns and the frankly massive pile of pillows accumulated on the floor and frowns.

“We’re going to lose power, asshole, don’t say a fucking word. And as much as I hope to someday be responsible for your brutally painful death, kicking you out for the night into the blizzard of the century isn’t going to be how I do it. I’m a good fucking host. Fuck you.”

“Oh man, you really hit the nail on the head, there, murder threats are the hallmark of high-class hostery.”

As he fusses about pillow arrangements, you head out to the common kitchen to microwave a few bags of popcorn in advance of the inevitable outage. When you come back, everything is lantern-lit and childhood-pillow-fort-esque in the best possible way.

“Me and Rose used to make our bunk bed into a fort,” you say absentmindedly. “This is sick as hell. Hey, there’s actually a cool tent trick you can do, if you’ve got an extra sheet or two?”

He does, and soon you have a canopy to match the nest of pillows on the floor.

Karkat looks about as satisfied as you’ve ever seen him, which isn’t a high bar, but would pole vault over that shit even if it was.

“Yeah,” he says, more to himself than to you. “This is right, how you should see it.”

“I always wanted my first time to be special,” you say, rolling back on the three pillows you’ve claimed as your own, and he chokes on his own tongue and starts to cough. “Watching a shitty - sorry, _visionary_ chick flick is such an intimate moment in a young man’s life. Be gentle with me, Karkat.”

You take this moment to open the movie theater butter popcorn and offer him some with what you think is a spectacularly saucy wink.

What are you going for here? You’re not even remotely sure, but Rose has been gently ribbing at you, just a little too subtly not to be deliberate, about your movie dates with Egbert and your mystery beau, and you wonder if she’s not seeing something that you’re missing. Because you do. Well. You do like him, in the same way you like sour candy that you can’t eat more than a couple of pieces of before it burns the shit out of your tongue and then you can’t taste anything for three days. He’s funny, and he actually has really strong opinions and reasons for having them.

And you can’t imagine him ever playing a mind game, which is weirdly foreign to you, because mind games are basically how Rose shows that she loves someone and oh god you have got to stop thinking about your sister while you’re snuggled up on a cute guy’s floor.

It’s nice, though. The sense that you could read him like a book if you spoke his language, which you don’t, really, but you’re learning. He likes the swedish fish, like you knew he would, because he had a whole rant about how much he hates the way they stick in his teeth. You’re no fucking slacker in the mind games olympics yourself.

The movie begins with a brilliantly red sunset, and Karkat sighs, glancing over at you nervously.

“You planning on taking off the shades, or do I need to turn the brightness up to compensate for your fashion sense?”

Oh, what the hell. You’re feeling pretty phenomenally at peace - you got your geochem lab report in, you’re on top of all your shit, Rose is almost certainly about to get laid, if she just has the sense to put your playlist on, and good for her, and great time to change the subject, ugh. It’s all cozy, and the snow outside is relentless, and the lanterns are cool, and you’re just… happy.

Gross.

But you decide to go for it.

“Careful,” you say, “I don’t wear these things for _my_ protection, y’know.”

“No shit,” he replies, “with the number of times I’ve seen you trip on the stairs in the dark on your way out of class -”

There’s a momentary pause as he realizes what he’s said.

“Someone should really warn me about those things,” you say, deadpan, and he actually laughs, trailing off when he looks back up at you and realizes you’re smiling at him.

“Pay attention,” he says, a little brusquely. “This is an important part.”

An old woman looks out over a lake, ducks scatter as a man in a rowboat pulls his way through the mirrored surface of the water, and you wriggle around until you’re as comfortable as possible, though you feel there must be a word more dignified than wriggling for what you’re doing, and let yourself get into it.

Karkat did watch Zombieland, and did eventually concede that it was _really fucking good_ , so this is kind of the least you can do.

The power cuts out halfway through, about an hour in, when the old-guy narrator is telling you about all the fancy carpentry that the main dude has completed. It’s only obvious because the laptop switches to battery power and Karkat curses in between explaining the significance of Rachel McAdams’ hairpiece in the previous scene and moving on to the refurbished house as a metaphor for hope.

It’s like he can’t stop himself.

 _You’re_ certainly not going to stop him.

By the time the movie wraps up, you’ve pretty much gotten used to the unremovable subtitles, though the lag between picture and dialogue has gotten excruciatingly noticeable.

Karkat has finished all of the swedish fish.

You have shed a couple of very manly tears, which would bother you a little less if you’d kept your glasses on, but… fine, it’s sad! And maybe a little cathartic, for someone who needs catharsis, unlike you, reigning champion of well-adjustment and emotional stability.

Then you make the mistake of mentioning, in a fit of perhaps-somewhat-defensive pique, how you’re floored by the fact that this sort of deliberate toying with your heart could force tears out of you _twice_ , but before you can really get going on the topic, Karkat cuts in, cartoon smoke practically billowing out of his ears.

“ _You said you hadn’t seen it_!” he snarls. Do you detect a hint of… accusation? “Fucking hell, let me make a slack-jawed mansplaining garbage-idiot of myself, why don’t you? Please, Dave, nothing makes me happier than humiliating myself for your voyeuristic benefit.”

“Karkat,” you say, trying not to interrupt.

“No, really, way to top off a delightful fucking week. I should be grateful - I probably have eighteen new viruses to keep me company from digging up a copy that would actually fucking load. Little did I know, jester in your private fucking Truman show that I am, none of the last four hours I spent down a goddamned Pirate Bay rabithole fucking mattered!”

“Karkat,” you interject again, though his pause seems more like a ‘taking a breath’ moment than an ‘actually done chewing you out’ moment.

“Got something to say for yourself?” he huffs.

“First of all, the subtitles in Arabic and the half-second lag were pretty fuckin’ arthouse if you ask me. Second, I, uh, figured you’d want to talk about it, and I wanted to, you know, listen to your take and shit instead of trying to follow the movie the whole time. Subversive, I know, but the mansplaining was kinda doin’ it for me.”

He flushes crimson and snaps his mouth shut, which is a shame, because he was really on a roll.

“Actually,” you continue, “I think you’re really onto something. I didn’t _get_ the vehicle the first time through, since the ‘wife with dementia’ thing is about as subtle as an aged-up Ryan Gosling to the face and really comes off as deliberate and kind of unnecessary emotional extortion.”

“Yeah, but that’s not the point,” he interrupts, and you smile fondly at him as he launches into yet another explanation. “It’s easy to miss it in between all the ‘miracles’ bullshit, but in the end, the story-within-a-story is about the power of our own stories to influence our lives and our relationships through the sheer fucking _act_ of retelling them. It’s _love_ , and it’s _forgiveness_ , and the _centrality of storytelling to the human experience_ \- you know what, don’t get me started. Jeremy Leven makes the entire works of Shakespeare look like a heap of fetid trash.”

“Fuck that dude,” you say. “Midsummer Night’s Dream? More like midsummer night’s… lame.”

“Play within a play,” he snorts.

“Derivative,” you agree. “Overdone. Frankly, offensive.”

He shifts an inch closer to you, the beginning of a sincere smile forming on his lips, which is rare, for him. You guess it’s harder without sunglasses, keeping the personal shit on the inside of the person, where it belongs. He’s gotta work harder than you do.

For some reason, the whole conversation is reminding you acutely of an objection that came up in the aftermath of a community theatre performance of the aforementioned play that you attended, years ago, with your mother. Deep dissatisfaction about the outcomes for Helen or Helena or something and… Demetrius? You don’t really remember, and it doesn’t seem like something mom would have latched onto. You must have been upset about it, though, because you… were, at the lack of agency of the lovers, the only real actors being, of course, the fairies.

And to think, you’d mostly been excited about the sick costumes and the promise, per your mom, of pranks and shenanigans, which you were kind of just getting into as a kid.

Huh.

In that light, The Notebook really is a lot less problematic in some ways. Fewer magic-terminology-obfuscated date rape drugs and shit. Allie gets to live her own story once, even if she has to be spoon-fed it later after forgetting, which is a little iffy.

What are _you_ forgetting?

“Uh, Dave?” Karkat asks hesitantly, jolting you out of your whatever-the-fuck stupor.

“Huh?” you reply with characteristic eloquence.

“Are, uh, you okay?”

You reach over to where you left your shades, sliding them back on, feeling abruptly way-too-exposed. Like the warm glow of the blanket fort has turned cold. Something missing from it. You fight back the impulse to run home, because you don’t think it’s your apartment that you’re… you’re just so…

He asked you a question.

“Totally,” you say. “Great, maximum okay, just, y’know, having a good think or whatever.”

Karkat’s blinks, disbelieving but not willing to call you on your shit. To an almost ridiculous extent, actually, since… how long have you been zoning out six inches from him on his own duvet? On his floor, in his room… you’re struck with another wave of confusion, because it doesn’t make sense, you’re going to be stuck here all night, with the way the snow is coming down and the wind is tearing at the lakeside stand of trees that are scarcely visible through the white blur. Was this your plan?

“I just,” you say haltingly. “I think there’s something I should be doing, but I can’t… remember what.”

“Shit,” Karkat says. “God fucking damn it, Dave, you don’t - _fuck_. This is my fault. This is _weird_ , right? I seriously… Vriska’s been on my ass for weeks about… I’m an idiot, it’s okay.”

“Dude, what?”

He grimaces.

“She’s, you know, the irredeemable fucking psychopath in our barre class?”

“I know who Vriska is!” you insist, snorting with surprise, actually distracted now by how messy this has suddenly gotten for literally no reason.

“Fuck,” he says. “I’m really… thanks for coming over, I…”

You’re messing this up, and god, you don’t want him to be looking at you like this, thinking that you hate him or that you don’t like him or that you regret coming here for some reason, which is definitely exactly what he’s thinking.

And you don’t want to go home, actually. What were you thinking, living alone in your senior year?

“I’m sorry,” you say, “seriously, man, this is on me, I’m just… I don’t know, it’s dumb.”

“It’s not dumb,” he says stiltedly. “If you want to… talk about… anything… I could try, you know, to help, if you want, obviously, I mean…”

How stupid is it, feeling so completely and irrationally alone, six inches away from someone who, for some fucking reason, certifiably gives a shit about you? In the blizzard, in this weird haze of hopelessness, fear about what you’ll go home to, an empty room, a nameless sense of absence, there is absolutely nowhere to run.

For once, you don’t, because you can’t.

“Uh, hey,” you say, “seriously, thanks for having me over. You’re really… fun to watch stuff with.”

A voice you can’t remember tells you that was lame as hell, and to pull your shit together, you idiot, before Karkat has an aneurysm, and finally, you do.

You lean over, twine your fingers in his hair, and close the minimal remaining distance between you in a kiss. You’re almost completely certain that you jam your shades into his eye just slightly, but he doesn’t complain, doesn’t fight you, just relaxes into your hand despite this being possibly the worst kiss you’ve ever been a part of, you’re _completely_ off your game, but…

“Oh my god,” he whispers.

“Yeah,” you say breathlessly.

“ _That_ was your declaration of interest, you idiot piece of shit? ‘You’re fun to watch stuff with’? I should kick you out and let you sort your shit out with the blizzard, holy fuck, what is _wrong_ with you? We just watched the most romantic piece of media ever produced, and you can’t do any better than that? ‘You’re fun to watch stuff with’ my fucking ass!”

“What, you want to come up with a better confession, Spielberg? Draft me a little something-something, come on, line, please.”

“Fuck you.”

“Hey, you know I’m not that kind of girl.”

“ _Double_ fuck you.”

“If you insist,” you say, sighing exaggeratedly, rolling over on top of him as he squeaks in protest, which is honestly really rich given that, once he catches on to what you’re doing, he practically drags you closer to him, and ‘wriggling’ is a much more apt description of what he is doing now than anything you have ever done _ever_ , thank you very much.

“Oh my god,” he says again, in a very different tone, and you bite back a grin.

“Is this really what you want?” you ask, just to be crystal-fucking-clear, and he full-on glares at you.

“Yes, fuckface, _extremely yes_. Holy fuck, if you start monologuing or something right now I’m going to throw us both out of my window, that shit is horrible enough in class, I swear -”

On the bright side, the next kiss is enough to shut him up even mid-sentence, a power you have every intention of abusing relentlessly, and he sighs into your mouth before he begins to hungrily reciprocate. Despite the fact that you’ve both been taking the same barre class, you have about half a foot on him and easily pin him by the hips as you lift him gently into a deeper kiss, running your fingers through the soft hair at the nape of his neck.

He’s almost comically reactive, which is both extremely encouraging and distractingly adorable, precisely because it’s so unfamiliar. And you’re mentally high-fiving yourself in between getting into all that good shit, trailing kisses down his neck like you’re some kind of fuckin’ pro at this stuff, which you pretty much are.

And it almost works, the distraction of it.

Well, it _does_ , because for a long time, long enough for the power to come back on and the snow to settle on the windowsill and the sun to rise, you’re not thinking about anything but him. Which feels right. Like something you probably should have tried a long time ago. Like, in hindsight, ‘oh’. Fucking oh!

It’s not weird, really, waking up next to him.

He has a bruise on his clavicle, you notice, in the golden light of the morning filtering in through the snow-coated window. It’s barely noticeable on his skin, rosey purple against dark brown, but it still makes you smile. Your neck is actively sore, and you have a feeling that when you look in the mirror it’ll be a throwback to your first girlfriend in high school, who didn’t so much have a thing for hickeys as a thing against acting with any restraint whatsoever.

You should probably read the room before you joke with Karkat about that.

For a long time, you just settle in next to him and listen to him breathe. He rolls over at one point, still very much asleep, and winds up with his head on your chest, which is nice. You ruffle his hair a bit and go back to deliberately not thinking, which is luckily kind of a specialty of yours. It’s good not to be alone. You think you could get used to spending time like this in his room.

When he does open his eyes, the sun is no longer directly shining into his room. He blinks several times, his breath catching in his throat, like he’s waiting for you to disappear.

The thought makes your stomach turn. You lean in and kiss him on the forehead.

“Ugh,” he says, “have you brushed your teeth?”

“Mmmnope,” you say, then kiss him again.

“You’re disgusting,” he grumbles, but sort of sleepily nestles against you in a way that tips you off that he might not actually be that upset.

You stay like that for another while, running your fingers through his hair and watching the light shift as the morning burns towards noon.

“Hey,” you say. “Want to head down to the dining hall and get brunch?”

Admittedly, there are advantages to living in a big dorm on campus the way Karkat and most of your other friends do, namely the in-dorm dining halls connected to the residencies. You’re definitely not up for a trudge through the piled-up snow.

“Mrrngph,” he says against your chest, which makes you laugh. “If we run into Vriska, I’ll fucking kill myself and then her.”

“Cool,” you say, pressing a last kiss to the top of his head and shifting into a sitting position.

He rolls away and starts hunting for clothes. You’d ask to borrow a sweater or something, but you’re not totally sure that you wear the same size, and there’s really nothing wrong with the shirt and jeans you wore over.

“Holy shit,” he says, when you turn back to face him. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

“Huh?”

“Your…” he gestures vaguely, looking down like he can’t bring himself to meet your eyes.

“Dude, you’re going to have to be more specific than…”

You trail off when you catch a glimpse of yourself in his mirror. The best way to describe the way your neck looks might be ‘the immediate aftermath of an apocalyptic death match with an octopus’, or perhaps ‘an unfortunate vacuum cleaner related incident’ or ‘some kind of tragic dalmationesque birthmark situation’.

At his look of utter horror, you shake it off and laugh.

“S’cool, man. Kinda hot, actually. Like a sick cool-hot balance, like they’re going to have to come up with a whole new thermometer deal to describe the temperature anomaly in Dave’s Neck City.”

Karkat sighs.

“Come on, I’m starving,” you add, taking your coat from the closet and nonchalantly slipping on your shades. “Look, it’s going to be fine. Lemme get my boots and shit on, and we’ll go, and we’ll have a stack of pancakes and some awkward chitchat, okay?”

“You make it sound so appealing,” he says, hanging back to rifle through his closet for his own coat as you grab your scarf and start lacing up your boots.

The scarf seems like a great move - hell yeah, weather related excuses for not showing your neck - until you actually put it on and everything you’ve been avoiding comes flooding back. Because it smells like… something, like home, like a hug from your mom, like…

Where did it even come from?

You don’t remember.

You can’t remember.

It feels like your heart is breaking in half.

Everything is fine. Everything should be fine. Great, even. You should be over the fucking moon, you _know_ you should, that this makes sense, that this is how things are supposed to be, that there’s no reason Karkat should find you sobbing into your scarf outside of his room like a fucking idiot. The glasses aren’t doing nearly enough to hide it.

His mouth opens and closes and opens again.

“I’m… sorry?” he says slowly.

“It’s not you,” you insist, choking your way back to not-crying, furious at yourself for both losing your grip and for not even vaguely knowing why.

“Hey,” he says. “Hey, uh, there there.”

He stands on tip-toes, gets his eyes as level with yours as he can, and pats you on the side of your face. Pat, pat.

“What… are you doing?” you ask.

“I really don’t know, Kanaya does it when I’m losing my shit sometimes. Which kind of happens a lot. She’s literally a fucking saint for dealing with my bullshit, and way better at this kind of thing than I am, obviously. Not that anything going on with you is bullshit, _fuck_ , it’s just… it’s… it’s okay, probably.”

“Yeah,” you say quietly. “Probably.”

You wonder what’s wrong with you.

He takes your hand with sudden conviction and manages a moderately reassuring smile.

“Are you doing anything today?” you ask, as you head downstairs, past rosey-faced and snow-damp first years and hungover-looking seniors who you guess attended one of the many snow day parties the previous evening in the stairwell.

“Just catching up on some work, probably,” he says. “Meeting with my group for a sociology class presentation later. They’re all pretty tolerable. Nothing too pressing.”

“Do you want to hang out, then?”

You don’t want to be alone right now.

“I’ll let you know when social scientists figure out a time that I _don’t_ want to be hanging out with you, asshole, come on,” he says, nudging you in the ribs.

“Hey, Dave!” a familiar voice calls as you enter the dining hall. “Dude! Come on over!”

John flags you down from a round table where he’s sitting with Jade. Karkat shoots you a look of pure concern. You tighten your grip on his hand for a second, then release it.

“Yo, you guys mind if Karkat joins in?” you reply.

“Great!” John says, grinning. “The more the merrier! Can one of you guys grab me some more bacon at the buffet? I think they’re emptying out the freezers and I gotta get on this!”

None of it fixes the pit in your chest, of course, the way that words don’t come as easily as usual and the world feels a little darker than you think it strictly should. But Jade recounts her dream from the previous night in cinematic detail, and John eats two more plates piled high with cured meats and regails you all with the thesis of the essay he hammered out last night on theory of mind and the paranormal, and through it all, Karkat holds your hand under the table and keeps glancing at you intermittently to see if you’re okay.

And it isn’t right, and things may not feel right again for a while - you know yourself, you know how that can be.

You think, though, as your friends laugh and you make your way through a coffee and a nice crisp glass of apple juice, as you get a text from your mom asking for an update on your post-blizzard survival and then eighteen pictures of your cat back at home… Karkat is probably right.

It probably _will_ be okay.


	2. Jake: Mend fences.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's very hard to be Jake English, and no one, not even him, really understands.
> 
> He's working on it.

Jake: Mend fences.

You gather, after some extensive examination of the facts, that Terezi isn’t all that fond of abruptly collapsing spacecrafts, or perhaps has some kind of hangup about the infinite vastness of paradox space. She throws up what looks like a pile of battery casings and retreats to the respite bay midway through Rose’s attempt at a simplified explanation of the events of the last few hours.

“Great,” she chokes, “Great, totally up to date, please stop talking now.”

Rose watches her go, and you nod knowingly, recognizing with scholarly precision that Terezi is exhibiting the human emotion called ‘post traumatic stress disorder’. You consider mentioning this to Kanaya in a sort of concerned, conspiratorial, and vaguely paternal way, but decide not to. Kanaya typically catches on to these sorts of things with remarkable alacrity on her own.

The two of you have gotten to know each other well enough in the last month and a half that you’re reasonably confident on that point, and you settle into the co-pilot’s chair without issue as Rose meanders about in search of something to clean up the mess on the floor. The incident on the other ship already feels more like a memory than anything, which is unsettling. Though isn’t everything a memory at this point? All a stew of well-seasoned experiences and thoughts and insights, boiled at high heat, serving up a you-in-the-present with a delightful afterthought of rosemary and thyme.

Some of them don’t coherently fit together, but you’re used to that, and working around your shitty brain is your very long, multi-word middle name! 

After all, you can remember, now, in a way that you couldn’t before, the moment that you shattered.

It wasn’t something that you’d ever considered you might be able to do. If you’re any sort of glass, you’re a top notch quartz-glass-clad polycarbonate acrylic, capable of resisting multiple direct hits from a .357. You’ve been working on a similar material for the viewing ports of your ships. It’s patently not enough to be heat and pressure resistant these days!

And there you were. No longer you, a voice in the back of your own head, screaming, silent. And Dave… and Karkat… and… well, none of it mattered, except everything did, and there was nothing you could do about it, because most of you wasn’t _you_ anymore. To be fair, you can admit, with the benefit of hindsight and some subtle sylph-y intervention, that it was probably the biggest kick in the pants you’ve received to date about bucking up and acting as captain of your own _metaphysical_ ship, taking accountability and all!

Shame about everything you had to lose for that to really sink in, and what a tomfool you managed to make of yourself in the process.

Kanaya has been very understanding, though she does get a little green in the gills when you go off on tangents about learning from the experience and all, so you try to do that in your head. Which is still rather a soupy mess, as you’ve established, but what kind of cretin can’t appreciate a good soup?

No one is talking very much, or at all. Probably a good thing. Rose reappears with a box of baking soda to neutralize the battery acid eating through the beaten steel flooring, tidies up the ensuing pile of goop, and deposits the remnants in the waste air-lock to be released into paradox space.

“I’ll check on Terezi,” she volunteers, not speaking to anyone in particular, and you twist in your seat to fire a few finger-guns her way.

Kanaya exhales as the port slides closed behind her wife.

You don’t ask. Just keep your eyes on the coordinates, fiddle with the damaged communications system, and periodically lean in to assess the status of the power core. The energy signature of the collapsed extranarrative reality in your wake continues to ignite a little green ‘warning’ light, but that’s more or less to be expected. Eventually, after running several systems checks, you satisfy your concerns that the core itself may be damaged and lean back to stare out into the inky spacescape before you.

“That’s that, then,” you say.

She sighs again.

“You should rest, Jake. I’ll keep us on track until we’re out of range of the disruption.”

Her severed arm is resting on her lap, mostly ignored, haloed in barely-visible black radiance. She notes where your gaze is conspicuously focused and shifts her skirt slightly to cover the appendage.

“Can’t I do anything to..?”

“No.” She winces at her own tone, then relents. “I’m sorry. I could use a moment alone to process. It would be a great help, though, if you could relieve me of this position in a few hours.”

And, you think, that would probably give her enough time to stick that arm back together with her shoulder-socket. You hope you haven’t already violated some unspoken rule of trollish discretion by staring openly at the severed body part. Who’s really to say what is or isn’t appropriate?

“Understood,” you say, not at all looking forward to sleeping, but supposing you might as well get it over with and dive straight into whatever your subconscious manages to come up with this time, freshly supplied with brand-spankin’-new nightmare fodder as it has recently been.

You wonder what exactly _has_ happened to him. Just as quickly, you force yourself to stop thinking about it for long enough to avoid tripping over Terezi, who has tucked herself almost entirely into a compartment that would typically house emergency life support equipment, were the crew physiologically vulnerable to the effects of paradox space and not lighting out on a second's notice after a couple of even-more-omniscient-than-usual living gods as opposed to any normal errand.

She doesn’t precisely hiss at you, but you’re acutely reminded of the fact that you know nothing about her beyond anecdotes relayed third-hand and the fact that she is presently suffering far more visibly than you are.

“Can I get you anything?” you offer, stooping so as not to loom quite so thoroughly, and she shakes her head. “And you know where to find the respite bay, I assume?”

Her slamming the compartment door closed is enough of an answer.

Oh, well.

At least you’ll almost definitely have a free bed in the bay.

You hesitate at the entryway until you can press your worries back down, brace yourself, hopefully, for an excuse not to sleep, no matter how much your body resists each further second upright. You’re equally nervous to face her again, whether you find her conscious or not, despite her being your best potential distraction from your own exhaustion.

She’s awake, gazing at the wall in the place where there might be some sort of viewing port, if this chamber wasn’t in the center of the ship, more or less, and when she looks up, her expression is peculiarly distraught, though she smiles slightly when you feign a knock at the bay door and grin.

“Come on in,” she says, “It’s good to have company.”

“It’s good to be company,” you reply gratefully. “We sure do have a lot to parse out, don’t we? I can’t say I’ve ever been more keen for a hopefully-uneventful multi-week-long sojourn in the depths of paradox space.”

You hoist yourself easily into the second bunk, which is more tight than cosy - you didn’t design this portion of this ship for your own physiological parameters, since most humans aren’t so tall or broad in the shoulders as you are, and you fit, of course, but it’s a bit of a contortion act.

It’s familiar, though - you and Kanaya have been trading off in these bunks for weeks. Not you as you are now, not _quite_ , what with all the wacky brain-shenanigans that have been afoot, but the mechanics of it, at least, are familiar. Your body in the context of this ship is as _familiar_ as anything is.

Rose takes a deep breath, with some ceremony to it, like she’s about to say something of grave importance, and trusting that she usually is, you shift in your bunk to face her, an open invitation.

“When I was a child… every time that I was a child… I read a novel,” she says quietly, and you watch and wait, listening to her in your own silence.

She looks up at you as though she’s waiting for you to interrupt, but you don’t. Just smile as encouragingly as you can manage when she meets your eyes. Apparently satisfied by your gesture of acknowledgement, though a crease appears between her eyebrows, Rose goes on.

“The name isn’t important. I ultimately found some of it rather objectionable, particularly the portrayal of the women who inhabited the world it described. I’d expected more of Ursula K. Leguin, who I still consider something of a role model, though I recognized, to an extent, that it wasn’t written for me. At least, not me at ten years old or so. There was, however, a wizard on the cover, and in the title, which was roughly my criteria for a good read, so I hesitate to cast too many aspersions on it in hindsight.”

“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” you observe.

“Quite,” she agrees with a small smile. “Like much of the literary body of wizard-flavored fiction, it follows the exploits of a young man as he comes of age and confronts, at length, through both meteoric successes and devastating failures, his own hubris, and ultimately his own dark nature. In this case, the underlying propensity for darkness is personified as a shadowy effigy summoned in his youth while attempting to impress a girl. He ultimately defeats his shadow-self by naming it with his own name, and subsuming the very figment of himself hell-bent on his destruction, rendering him complete and the absolute master of his Self.”

She waits, again, for you to provide commentary of some sort. At least, you imagine that to be what she’s doing, as she toys with a strand of her hair and watches your face for some kind of reaction.

“I can’t say I ever did much wizard-type reading,” you admit, “and I regret that, somewhat. It seems to have been a formative experience for more than one person I respect a great deal! And most of my preferred media treated magic as something rather sinister - Mysterio, master of illusion, being hardly the best wizard-representation for a curious young buck.”

“It was a good book,” she says. “In the end, I’m glad to have read it. It was doubtlessly influential to my own writing, though I think I took an altogether unintended lesson from it about underlying sinister effect inherent to the pursuit of knowledge. A lesson which made me perilously susceptible to certain kinds of suggestions about the acquisition of these sorts of faculties. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, that sort of thing. I’m a ready-made mark when it comes to thinking the worst of myself. I hope it’s not the truth.”

“Can’t you tell?” you ask, a little surprised by her uncertainty on the subject. “I’d thought that was more-or-less your specialty, the whole truth business. The number-one Seer of Light export, if you will.”

“De _light_ ful,” she says, then dissolves into laughter at her own joke, which makes you laugh as much as the pun does, and is all a tremendous relief, though her face falls again after a second, and she’s back to staring up at the low ceiling of the sleeping bay.

You have to tighten your metaphorical grip around the desire to reach out and remedy the pure hopelessness suddenly emanating from her side of the bay, like a black hole yawning open in her bunk.

“The last time I felt my mind… changed, like this, I had… well, I leaned heavily on my father. I can see _everything_ , Jake, really everything this time, and it’s tearing me apart all over again. Everything that I left behind will move on without me, and already has, and I’ll have to do the same with the knowledge that twenty-two years meant nothing that couldn’t be retconned out of existence without so much as a wrinkle, when I occupy infinite positions in this universe and so many others, when I’m capable of being completely meaningless, and ending worlds, and saving them, and killing people, and hurting… _everyone_ , making these impossible choices, making them incorrectly, never making them at all… I’m not looking forward to navigating these depths on my own. It seems like the kind of thing that could devour a person. The sort of thing that devoured him.”

It’s not exactly the distraction from your worries that you were hoping for. Rather, you’ve more-or-less circled back to the meat of them, at least the top layer of muscle on the worry-beast, situated directly below the insular subcutaneous fat of being-totally-okay-with-everything.

Just as well.

“Is that what happened to him, then?” you ask, your throat tightening unaccountably around the question.

“I think so.”

“This is the sort of matter for which one really could use a heart player, I suppose,” you comment, trying not to clear your throat too conspicuously. “The big ‘who am I’ questions. He was good with those.”

“He had a few blind spots,” she says softly.

“Oh, more than a few,” you agree, which is an odd thing to say without feeling crushingly guilty, and you make up for it immediately by feeling crushingly guilty for not feeling crushingly guilty, and all is more-or-less right in the world.

“Are you alright, Jake?” she asks.

“Right as rain!” you say, which is exactly what you ought to be saying, and in an approximation of the correct tone, too!

She doesn’t say anything, just waits for you to add or elaborate or some such business, though you really wish she would cut in and move this along to a different topic, one that aches a little less, something less confusing.

“I’m of two minds,” you continue vaguely. “About almost everything. But at least I have a mind to be of! Perhaps even more than one! Don’t think for a second I’m not grateful for that luxury.”

“You don’t have to just be _okay_ about it,” she says. “I’m certainly not. Frankly, I’m wrestling with the impulse to sob into my pillow for the next month or so.”

To emphasize this point, she takes the economically-proportioned pillow from her bunk and hugs it to her chest. You think she looks a great deal younger than you remember. Actually twenty-two, when she’s always seemed so much older and more put-together. The paternal stirrings in your chest are both the most normal occurrence you can imagine and strikingly disquieting.

“Ah, Rose,” you say, “who am I, exactly?”

She winces.

“Mostly whoever you remember being, before… but not completely.”

As far as ‘before’ goes, you already have something of a timeline. Under your tutelage, Kanaya got the hang of piloting the craft remarkably quickly and overtook the others in chasing down Dirk’s borrowed ship, which was, at the time, all you wanted to do, though for notably different reasons. You imagine that’s probably why she insisted on your accompanying her personally - they’re your ships, after all, and tearful or not, you were highly motivated, and once you’d… she’d helped you… calm down a bit, well, you’re about the best flight instructor a vengeful troll gal could ask for!

It’d been roughly an hour’s worth of circling a wreath of light, watching as tendrils of pink began to overtake the gold, when something shook you off your course, dragged you headlong into the pulsing mass of glowy something-or-other, and you’re still not sure whether that was before or after Kanaya slammed on the accelerator, but…

After that, you were different.

You’d been doing fairly well for yourself beforehand, of course. Kanaya really put up with a lot of nonsense from you - it’s a good job you know your way around a starship, or there’d have been no point in bringing you along! They would have been better off shooting you up with some of those horse tranquilizers, leaving you to wallow in your misery and streamlining the operation, no doubt.

A week or two into things, though, you could think clearly again, or, well, _think_ , at least. Do something other than step in briefly as co-pilot and dither about how heartbroken you were. By the time you reached the light-cocoon that you now understand to have been wrapped around Dirk’s ship, you and Kanaya were doing your fair share of confabulation on all sorts of topics.

None of them the most important one, the one she kept trying to gently circle back towards. Obviously, you felt frightfully guilty for talking her ear off about Dirk, and what you hoped to say once you found Dirk, and pleading with her not to kill Dirk, and all that mess in those first few days, and you didn’t want to bother her with that kind of thing or remind her of how pathetic you came off if you could avoid it. And then, after a white-knuckle twenty-second descent into the hull of the very craft you’d been chasing all that time, you were hit with a deluge of memories, most of which couldn’t be yours, didn’t make any sense at all, and it was like…

Well, it was a little bit as though you’d never fallen to pieces at all, which was surely disingenuous on someone’s part, most likely your own.

Rose glances at you, and then down at her pillow.

“In another universe, the one with which you collided and from which my present embodied form originates, you were a good friend of my parents. Not to analyze this too much, as that would frankly be agony for the both of us, but something of a paternal substitute for myself, and especially for Dave, since our father died before we were born.”

“Oh. Well, sounds like a stand-up fellow,” you say, smiling. It’s a bit of a relief, after all, and casts some light on some… what were, at the time, some awfully confusing responses to the goings-on.

“I thought so,” she says. “But to clarify, you wouldn’t be so much _him_ as _what I thought of him_ , if the distinction matters to you. Dirk would be only slightly better-equipped to explain the exactitudes of his distillation of our twin universes. Neither of us could hope to do more than speculate. Predictably, his plans decrease markedly in coherence and forethought when he is forced to improvise. I believe he was concerned that, were human Vriska and human Kanaya and myself left to wander about in our native timeline, the contagion of relevance would spread, which was not an irrational concern. I doubt he would have deliberately chosen, as a panacea, a conditional-being plane distinct from reality based on localized dual-faceted-relevance, but he would not have had many options.”

“Huh,” you say, having mostly followed the important parts, you think.

“‘Huh’ is a perfectly reasonable response,” she replies.

“That’d be a first,” you chuckle, and she frowns at you over her pillow.

“Not really. Can you remember… anything about the self from my universe? If it can be called ‘mine’, anyway. You got Dave on an excavation site, talked him into his geoscience double major… I’m still not sure how you managed that, he was unbearably hesitant about committing to that volume of laboratory classes. You worked very hard to make up for… whatever you believed had happened between you and our father. I wasn’t always open to it, but you _tried_ , which mattered.”

“I wish I could remember,” you say, wincing as you say it, since you’re not actually sure that’s true. “I haven’t been very good about… oh, you know, hanging on to real things, that sort of business, for a while. I can’t completely blame him, either, probably shouldn’t at all, since the distance-from-reality schtick is something I’ve been cultivating independently for, ah, shall we say twenty-two years?”

You laugh, a bit nervously, to fill the silence of her not replying to that.

“Would you like to see? I could show you,” she says, after a painfully long pause. “That’s something I can do now.”

The laughter catches in your throat.

“I don’t know,” you say. “It’s been quite a day. I’m not sure… I really might blow a gasket, taking on another… disappointment.”

“You were never a disappointment to me,” she says gently. “May I, Jake?”

She reaches out a hand in your direction. Because the sleeping bay is so condensed, it’s easy enough to reach across to accept it, though you shiver slightly in the process, less from reluctance and more from sheer nerves.

It’s not a flash, but a slow fade-back-in, a crispening of the memories that have been losing their clarity since you left Dirk’s ensmallened universe-thing. One in particular rises to the surface, like cream in raw milk. A warm moment, your telling a no doubt heavily embellished story over the dinner table, Roxy looking older and a little sadder but smiling, Jane nodding along all friendly-like in the next seat, two little white-haired children gazing at you with rapt attention as you recalled the mundane exhuming of a midden heap somewhere in southwest Florida in the most trumped-up terms imaginable.

You can see it from their perspective, too, even more clearly. These little humans think you’re about the best thing since sliced-strata excavation trenches, and they both look so very much like… like…

When you open your eyes - did you close your eyes? - they’re a bit damp and misty.

No one, you think, has loved you like that in an awfully long time.

“Was that helpful?” she asks.

“Very,” you breathe. “My stars, Rose, what a life.”

“It was a difficult self to relinquish, but necessary.”

You try to reach for her hand again, thinking to reciprocate in some meaningful and likely hope-y way, but she’s withdrawn entirely to her bunk, and you politely do the same.

It makes more sense, though, why you wanted so badly to bring him home, even with all of your misgivings, no matter how it twists your insides into knots, thinking too hard about the logistics of it, the risks, the memories you’ve managed to hold onto, none of which are even remotely flattering to either of you. You also had these beautiful suspended-in-time pieces of self in which he was conspicuously missing.

What you feel now isn’t the odd sense of intrusive-identity that made you buoyant and unreal on the other spacecraft. Rather than something new superimposed over your Self, it’s as though you’ve walked through an old picturebook with your grandmother and recalled some long-forgotten memory of your childhood.

Things feel clearer and more your own than they have in a long time, which is… well, this other-you isn’t you, but he is, just… 

“I thought... I would be able to help him,” you feel yourself saying aloud. “Patch things up, as it were, for all I didn’t do when he was suffering alone. Which was horrible of me, really, because for all that happened between us, he was a friend to me at my worst, and I loved him. Maybe I wouldn’t personally make much of a difference, after everything, I mean, you heard him, but it was what he’d always _tried_ to do for me, and there was always - you, or Kanaya, or just a good therapist, since surely we’ve got a few of those on Earth C, and then… that’s an awfully selfish thought, isn’t it? But then I could stop feeling so damned _guilty_ about the whole business, and then I’d be allowed to feel the other things, you know, if I wanted to.”

Her expression is almost unbearably sad.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Why should you be sorry?” you laugh. “Goodness, Rose, you saved us. Bested, of all people, in a battle of wills…”

You trail off, here, for no real reason.

“Is he dead?” you ask. “Really dead, never to return?”

“Yes. The entity that he had become was destroyed.”

Her vaguery and use of the passive voice does not completely escape you, and you wonder if the reality of what happened to Dirk may be yet another truth you simply don’t want to hear.

“Good,” you say. “I suppose that’s for the best.”

“It was the best I could do,” she says shortly.

Both of you are silent for long enough that you wonder if she has fallen asleep.

“Thank you,” you finally say.

“For what?” She laughs harshly. “The more I look at it, the more I’m forced to recognize that I did little more than convince a suicidal man to kill himself in a manner I preferred slightly to his own design. Fundamentally a neutral, lateral move in the grand scheme of… nothing, or everything. Is that heroic in the slightest? Is that something a hero does? Something _I_ do, now? I don’t… know, because it’s unknowable in the absence of the neatening influence of a single narrative, a single self, or even two selves, or… it’s unbearable. It’s profane, that all of this awareness comes at the cost of any self that might benefit from it even marginally. The framework has dissolved. Everything has the potential to mean something to someone, and I’m all of them, and my vision is snarled with threads. Subjectivity is truth. What a stupid thing to be right about.”

“Are you sure about that?” you reply, probably too quickly, but your dissatisfied frown has been deepening as she speaks.

She raises a single delicate eyebrow.

“Isn’t that all a bit too easy? To dismiss it, I mean. If everything he did was utterly inconsequential, if it would have been just as well to leave me as I was, or to let him kill those who stood in his way, or to follow him on his path to kick off a whole new universe-sized tragedy… that’s just awfully sad, and I don’t think I can agree with you that those scenarios are comparable at all with our present trajectory! I… prefer myself as I presently am, and I prefer you and both Kanayas _alive_ , regardless of narrative positioning and memory hijinx, and I prefer… well, I would have preferred it, I think, if he were still here, if only so that I could also maintain the hope that he and I could resolve our conflicts someday. But for heaven’s sake, Rose, we’ve got a whole world that we left behind yet to fix, don’t we? What could be more meaningful than bringing this craft home and repairing the damage we’ve done to the people we love?”

The white glow of your rising certainty illuminates her face, now, and every corner of the respite bay as well, with an otherworldly luminescence. It’s as though your little spiel has turned the lights on in your own head, too, the same intense concentration and certainty you’ve successfully evaded for such a long time directed inward.

You swallow it for a moment more.

“I may be a fragmented subject,” you say, “but I am, well, a subject, and as far as subjective truth goes… the world we’ve got today, or the narrative, or the universe, or… sorry, terminology has never been my strong suit, but you get the jist of it, don’t you? It’s how it is, and I think you know better than anyone, probably ever, how it _is_. But it also… it _can_ be other things! Limitless other things, I might add. And I can’t imagine a better person than you to make the call as to… what kind of world we’ll wake up in tomorrow, but you won’t have to do it alone. It will be a different one than it was today, either way, and we’ll have a chance to try again. So if you’ll look at me as a, err, one subjective data point among infinite others, as a starting block for the marathon to come… I believe in you!”

“You’re right,” she says, closing her eyes, her whole face scrunching in on itself with concentration. “I should probably… sleep. I’ll be better equipped to handle this once I’ve caught a few hours’ rest. And I will. I _will_ handle it. You and Kanaya and the rest won’t have to worry.”

“Should you need a buddy to swap monologues with, I’m no great shakes at the business, but…” you continue, trailing off as she turns slightly away, bathing her face in shadow once again.

Despite her obvious exhaustion, you don’t want this moment to disappear. It reminds you of so many others that you can see all too clearly now - jumping-off points, crossroads, the sort it’s deadly-easy to miss from the thick of it. Where you either hold onto someone or you let them drift away.

You’re a real hell of an expert at letting people go.

Not this time. Not his daughter. Even if she fights you, you’ll… you’ll fight right back!

For a whole litany of reasons, you’ve been skating over the surface of one of your last real conversations with him in your head for the last few weeks without really fathoming it - blessedly, not the last-last one, which, even at your most Jake-shaped-shattered-china-doll, you’d have done anything to keep from so much as acknowledging - but not long before the last season of your ridiculous television show was set to kick off, when he wound up on your doorstep, uncharacteristically hollow-cheeked and disheveled and not nearly as drunk as he typically was upon showing up in the dead of night.

It’s all too clear, now, and with the light she’s given you and the certainty in the truth that it’s ignited, you can’t continue to look away once it starts to hurt. It all comes back.

He’d told you to kiss him, and that was the first time you felt his words coil around your neck with all the weight of a hangman’s noose. But you hadn’t been ready to believe that of him, that he would… you laughed it off, shook away the command as sheer nonsense, nerves, another bout of his cyclical neuroses that you knew so well. You willed it not to be, and it _wasn’t_ , for one night more.

You invited him in, and the rest was, well, almost exactly as it always was. He was prone to carry on one-sided conversations about all manner of topics as you drifted off, him laying a foot and a half away, positioned vigilantly atop your duvet with all the ease of an articulated mannequin until you inevitably rolled him into an embrace to settle him down a bit and he inevitably yielded to some combination of exhaustion, the comfort of being held, and your contagiously analgesic hope for a good night’s sleep. It didn’t matter all that much, at that moment, that his monologue was even more dizzyingly incoherent than usual, leaning towards cruel at intervals, morose at others, answering his own rhetorical questions about free will and entropy, reasonably common topics, though with uncommon fervency.

Sometimes it was like that. Just one more reason to tune him out, not to listen. He would apologize in the morning, or whenever he got around to it. There was a rhythm to these nights.

When you’d had enough of it, rather than say anything in particular, you quieted him with your touch and turned the room white with soft luminescence. You had a shareholder meeting the next morning, and you’d need to shower again, and this was all a real hassle, becoming such a frequent occurrence, one you’d really need to address with him man to man, if you could just muster up the gumption to talk to him in the light of day.

As usual, he went silent. Breaking pattern, though, rather than drifting off against your chest, he dug his nails urgently into your shoulder, rousing you unwillingly back to consciousness.

“Please,” he told you softly. “Something’s wrong. They’ve been back for… a while. I’m flipping my shit.”

You chuckled at that, like an idiot.

“I thought you left your splinters in the game?” you’d suggested, preparing yourself to grin and bear it through yet another of his mind-bending explanations of something-or-other, always something unfathomably important that demanded your full attention at the most inconvenient moment possible, as though he had a sixth sense for it.

“They weren’t gone. They were…” he choked on the words. In hindsight, it should have been very convincing. Dirk, after all, was so resistant to surrendering even an ounce of dignity for a mere _bit_. “They were _waiting_. For a weak point. And I’m losing it. Please. I’m fucking trying, but I can’t… they’re in me. They’ve been in me. It’s me, they’re me, I can’t… I’m going to hurt someone, Jake, please…”

“Dirk,” you’d said, so horribly sharply, you’d _snapped_ at him, the light of your conviction dimming drastically, “I thought we’d talked about this, my friend, you know you only have to ask when you need something from me, none of this ridiculous business with the… well, the threats are just not acceptable! I swear we worked out a plan for such an eventuality, you know, last time?”

He’d gone quiet, then, though his grip on your shoulder didn’t let up by so much as a fraction.

“Of course,” he finally said, flat and disaffected as ever, back to normal.

“Awfully rich, with the constructive criticism you’ve levied regarding _my_ pillowtalk,” you added, rolling your shoulders against the irksome sting of his nails in your flesh.

“If I hurt you, I won’t be able to f -”

“Christ on a cracker, Dirk, you couldn’t if you tried. Rest that pretty head.” You held him tighter, and he loosened his own grip at long last.

In hindsight, you wonder if some part of him took that as a challenge.

Regardless, his breathing steadied. All lapsed back into normalcy. You were grateful for that. Enjoyed, more or less, the way things were. So you did nothing. Just waited for the next thing to happen.

“I’ll get a handle on this,” he finally said, sounding a touch bleary, properly tired, at least.

“Maybe so,” you agreed, as though you hadn’t heard that one before.

“Stay with me.”

You didn’t reply.

“I can still see a future when I’m with you.”

You were so goddamned tired of fighting with him.

In the morning, when you rose before the sun, he slept on, his shades slipped from the bridge of his nose at some time in the night. That was odd. He was never a heavy sleeper - at least, not in your bed. The bruiselike circles beneath his eyes stood out, stark and deep, even in the twilight of the early hours.

After a second of deliberation, fresh from your shower and thinking (you felt) quite clearly, you penned a quick note, recommending that next time, perhaps, he turn to Dave or Rose or Roxy. It would be less complicated that way, for both of you.

He never mentioned any of it again, and he looked much better, all consummate Strider grace and unreadable visage, healthy and whole and well-rested and _normal_ , the next time you encountered him. So you gratefully accepted that the sentiment was mutual.

And then everything went straight to hell.

You utter fool. You absolute failure of a friend.

“With utmost respect,” Rose murmurs, “and really, I’m making every effort not to eavesdrop, but Jake, I’m also trying to sleep, here, and you think so fucking _loudly_.”

Blood rises to your face. It’s just as well that she can’t see, still has her eyes closed.

“Oh, damn, I’m awfully sorry, I’ll try to bring the whistle on the ol’ train of thought down a few notches,” you sputter, because of course she can read your mind, now, _idiot_.

“I _do_ appreciate the discretion with which you relay the narrative,” she adds. “There are some things I would rather not know too intimately about my father. But you should know that you weren’t the only person he spoke to on those matters. The last, but not the only one.”

“I’m afraid that doesn’t help much at all,” you say. “Rather makes it worse, actually.”

Because you’re worried for _her_ , now, and what a woefully inadequate safety net you’re offering her. Palliative care, never a cure, not for what has proved to be such a dire situation.

“Does it?”

“Well, it does,” you insist. “My fuckups on this front span universes! Whether or not anyone else has fallen short in the same sort of way, I daresay it makes a penny’s difference to a panhandler - I didn’t drop the ball any less, and it paints a rather dire portrait of the ascension-related-mental-breakdown-support business back on Earth C! And I suppose that means we have… a lot of work to do, if we’re to fix things in any meaningful way. It may be a substantially more _involved_ endeavor than I expected. But it changes nothing in the end, Rose. Regardless of what you’ve seen of the nature of my… past, or my motivations, now, I’m with you in this, if you’ll have me.”

Will this exonerate you? Probably not.

You’ll have to get used to things not exonerating you. That’s what you get, doing unforgivable things. It’s hard, though. It hurts, and you wish you felt like you deserved not-hurting, but you don’t.

“Unforgivable or not, it’s ultimately a matter for the reality-warper in the room to decide, Jake,” she says, very seriously, but with a touch of good humor in the set of her mouth. “You’ll be a different person tomorrow, and it will be a chance to try again.”

“Oh, you’re _good_!” you breathe. And she’s right, just as you were right, reassuring her in such similar words. You can keep… yes. You can keep figuring these things out. That business isn’t just for other people. You’re _also_ people! And you have to… be better.

You get the _chance_ to do so.

She laughs, and you suppose the gears turning behind your eyes must just be frightfully obvious and seem comically rudimentary to someone all omniscient and brilliant, which should probably embarrass you more than it does.

“I don’t especially want to go to sleep, if you can believe it, but I know that I ought to,” she adds. “Waking up different is a real and terrifying prospect. I _think_ the headache I’m enjoying is a function of exhaustion, but if it isn’t, if this is the last few minutes I’ll be able to hold on to any governable amalgamation of self at all…”

“Gee, and all _I’m_ working myself up over are nightmares and whatnot,” you sigh.

“Really?” she asks. “I would think you’d be able to... forgive my assumption, but don’t you typically have the ability to manipulate those sorts of things, even subconsciously?”

“The hope-y thing,” you supply.

“Ah, the Egbert school of thought on god-tier capabilities,” she laughs, and then goes completely silent.

You decide to give it a try. Most of your own embodied memories are colored, at the moment, with frustration at yourself, so you dig deeper into your other self, searching for something comforting without the aftertaste of rot.

There’s a lot to choose from, even though you find a touch of all-too-familiar guilt that you aren’t yet ready to delve into in the memories you share with the other Rose. Some failures, you suppose, are universal on your part, but… well, perhaps the remedies can be universalized as well.

She reaches out with a delicate hand, and you wrap it in your own, taking the both of you back to the site of a mammoth fossil discovery in Rutland, not far from where her family typically visited for the summer. You must have been doing some kind of work for the local historical society, and the afternoon spent roleplaying a functional and happy family was easy, and warm, and everything the present isn’t just yet.

“Right,” she murmurs, closing her eyes. “Right, that was… that was nice.”

“Rutland still exists on Earth C,” you say, watching her settle back into the bunk. “We’ll go, bring Dave and Roxy, make a day of it.”

“Yes, we will.”

“I hope that’s a light-cosponsored vision,” you chuckle, sinking back into the hazy memory such that the respite bay itself seems to warm, and you can almost feel the sun on your face. The world narrows to the single suspended moment in time. Dave tries to lift a piece of mammoth tusk only to be bowled over by the heft of the thing - you shepard Rose over to help him out, surreptitiously taking most of the weight yourself as Roxy snaps a disposable camera full of photos.

And that’s all the world is, here, for a little while.

“ _Oh_ ,” Rose says sleepily, her hand slackening progressively in yours. “This is so much… easier. Thank you.”

You no longer need the physical anchor to share your own recalled vision. Leaning back, you continue to meander through pleasant memories as her breathing evens out. Perhaps you’ll be able to keep this up in your dreams, even. How is it that you’ve never tried?

Clearly, you have a lot to learn from her. And months, years, a lifetime to learn it.

That’s a nice thought.

“Can you stay, for a while?” she asks.

“Until Kanaya needs a turn resting up,” you say apologetically. “She’ll take over then. You won’t have to be alone.”

“Ah… good.”

“Hush. Go to sleep,” you tell her.

“It might be easier to drift off without you acting as a human nightlight.”

“Shhhhh.”

She sighs, with an impressive measure of melodrama for such a noise of exhaustion. Beneath the soft haze of euphoria, you can feel the prickle of her uncertainty, her trepidation at what will come next. You can’t stay here forever. She knows that. Eventually, whether with Kanaya at her side or alone, she will have to face whatever all those alternate selves and all that ascending business has to offer.

It feels to _you_ like that concern might as well be an eternity away, but not everyone has such an affinity for hope.

“What time is it?” she asks, in a small and faraway voice.

“It doesn’t matter,” you tell her, endeavoring to layer the reassurance with the weight of your confidence in her, in Kanaya, in your unerring course back home. 

If you believe in nothing else, you believe in the two of them.


	3. ????: Remember.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ????

????: Remember.

It’s pathetic, how formlessly terrified you are. You know with sparkling-clear and crystal-cut certainty that you haven’t earned this reaction, even to being burned alive. That if you had an ounce of dignity left, you would go quietly, bow your head and take it.

On reflection, you wouldn’t deserve that modesty, either. This is justice. This is Just.

You still wish it could have been Dave.

In part because you sincerely think it might have been cathartic for the poor dude, at least, to get a last decapitation in there. That setting it up with that in mind might have been a point in your favor. You’re transparently still trying to bargain for your soul - but in death, as in life, your intentions count for absolutely fuckall. And it was Rose. The one you hadn’t really fucked up too much, you liked to think, not as most of the splinters, unless someone was counting your genetic contribution which, well, fuck, didn’t she just drown in the deep end of the Strilonde gene pool?

So you can’t be that sorry, can you, if you’re still joking about it as your essence chars away.

So it’s for the best that the fraction of a fragment of you that remains, seared raw, disembodied, clinging helplessly to the last brilliant memory of pure light, is screaming.

It could continue for millennia, or it could span barely the blink of an eye, not that you have eyes. Time doesn’t exist. That’s a hilariously ironic non-observation, even for you, but you’re not laughing, you’re _screaming,_ still, and no one can hear you. Not even yourself. You are as completely powerless as you always feared you would be, in the end, as you fade out of existence.

Let the punishment fit the crime.

It keeps happening, and then it stops.

…

[He wakes up.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20047735/chapters/47475769)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to hell.


	4. Vriska: Be that bitch.

Vriska: Be that bitch.

A few days before your final barre class, the professor sends around an email promising brownies to those who attend. That’s nothing special, since end-of-the-year bribes to show up are about the oldest hat in the book, but she adds a note suggesting that you’ll have an extra intense workout to justify the dessert, and you’re religiously opposed to honoring that sort of bullshit with your presence.

The problem is, Karkat’s a little bitch and Dave’s a slightly bigger bitch, height-wise and just in general, and neither of them is willing to have your back this one fucking time and sign your name on the roll sheet so you can cut and take a nap. Together, like Captain Bitch Planet, with both of their powers combined, they make one enormous pain in your ass.

That’s not quite fair, but you don’t really give a shit. Dave’s been having some kind of rough time or other lately, and you’ve been trying to ease up on him a bit, since the poor asshole’s got enough on his plate if dating Karkat is a step up from being alone.

Apparently your efforts to be less of a brilliantly incisive asshole have gone unnoticed, because both of them have saved a last free barre skip day - you were granted three at the beginning of the semester, you’ve _used_ four and won’t be able to get away with five - so they can go out for some dumb dinner and watch some dumb movie and yell at each other. So they won't be stepping up to the plate to help you out.

They don’t have to tell you their plans for you to know exactly what that’ll look like. You make an educated assumption, based on the evidence of ‘two hour-long classes a week enduring their nonsense’, and you’re right, and when you complain about it to Kanaya over breakfast, she agrees, though not in quite so many words.

“It’s just dumb,” you insist. “And a _huge_ buzzkill, since they’re my only friends, ish, friendsish, in that stupid class. What am I supposed to do, share my topical insights about the many analogues between hip rotation sets and prison-labor in gulags with Karkat while he’s got his tongue in his boyfriend’s mouth?”

“Poor thing,” Kanaya says distractedly, and you try to wrestle her phone out of her hand only to find that she’s literally texting Karkat while talking to you.

“You made this happen,” you declare, with dawning comprehension. “It’s _your fault_ they’re fucking.”

“Self-criticism has never been your vice,” she sighs, lifting her phone out of your reach. Stupid tall Kanaya and her stupid long arms and reluctance to let you read her personal correspondance. “I seem to recall your taking a personal interest in their getting together, for some ineffable reason, earlier in the semester.”

She frowns like she actually is trying to remember. You can’t blame her. What the fuck possessed you to give one single shit what or who Karkat did with his mouth? If you dwell on it for too long, it really doesn’t add up, and also kind of makes you want to hurl up the plate full of french toast sticks you just devoured.

“I was being an altruist, like usual,” you decide, after not thinking the matter over at all. “You were just fucking with me, on purpose, also like usual. Meddling. I see you, Kanaya, don’t think you can hide your hand in this grand web of relational fuckery. I’m onto you.”

“Vriska,” she sighs. “I’m sorry you’re annoyed by this turn of events, but I doubt very much that anyone is out to get you. Karkat hasn’t complained about your comportment in barre class in weeks. I was actually quite impressed, especially after that…”

She trails off.

Now you’re both frowning, because you can’t help but know exactly what she’s talking about. The Friday night snowstorm, when you woke up inexplicably in what you’re fairly sure was Dave’s apartment, exhausted and confused and unsure of how you got there but also, plot twist, completely sober. And Kanaya cried on you for like an hour, which had absolutely never happened before, but couldn’t, for the life of her, explain why.

You slept under a set of blankets on the floor of the living room, then made your escape once the snowstorm ended, chivalrously volunteering to never mention the incident again once you both came to the conclusion that neither of you could remember anything and collectively you understood jack shit.

Kanaya just _had_ to mention it to Karkat, though, and while she’s always careful to keep you from reading her messages, you’ve gathered that he was too nervous about his new hookup or whatever to pass it on to Dave, which was probably for the best.

Of course, you were both very careful around each other for a week or so, waiting for something else to happen, for a memory to come creeping back, or in your case, mostly, for Kanaya to show up on the foot of your bed in the middle of the night with a filleting knife or something to reveal that she’d drugged the shit out of you to stop you from stealing her nutella.

You went back to stealing her nutella fairly quickly once it became clear that no big disclosures were coming from either of you.

And shit went back to normal, mostly.

Dave actually turns out to be moderately more tolerable and less up his own ass when he’s whatever-the-fucking, emphasis on the fucking, with Karkat. Gross, but predictable, since the belligerent sexual tension wasn’t doing either of them any favors. The pretentious asshats deserve each other. Probably the happiest the fuckers have ever been.

Which is stupid, because you’re fucking miserable, but it’s mostly because you have a complex analysis exam in twenty minutes and Kanaya found out and decided to force you to eat breakfast beforehand, which is a thing that sadists do. ‘Concerned for your welfare’ your finely-sculpted barre-augmented _ass_.

At least it’s one of those happens-like-clockwork things that makes everything seem typical.

Crocuses push up through the sod, the demonic canada geese return to the pond with their annual hellspawn goslings, and Kanaya, given an eighth of an opportunity, meddles with anyone in meddling-range.

“We ought to host a little get together to honor the end of the PE courses this week,” she muses, pushing a piece of cantaloupe around her plate. “So many seniors left it to the last possible second. It truly wasn’t just you.”

If you make it through this exam without blowing your brains out, you think you’ll be legally bound to throw a rager to rival your first-year bullshit.

“Nothing like first year, of course,” she adds, eyeing you closely, and you grin, the very picture of innocence and demurity.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Entirely fair. There’s little chemical reason for you to remember any of it,” she says.

“Hey, after four years of voluntarily putting up with my shit, you don’t get to pretend you don’t like me,” you tell her, making what you imagine is a very compelling frowny face. “C’mon, say it. What if I don’t live through this midterm? You’ll be all sad if the last thing you did was fuss about the dumbass stuff I did like a whole lifetime ago for no reason.”

“Pushy.”

“Say itttttttt.”

“As you wish,” she says mildly, setting aside her plate and leaning in over the table to make uncomfortable eye contact. “Vriska, I’m endlessly proud of you and grateful for your role in my life. You’re a remarkably loyal friend, clever to a fault, and you’ve worked harder than anyone I know to better yourself -”

“Bad idea, this is giving me hives, bye!” you interrupt, grabbing your backpack and making a break for the dining hall’s exit, leaving your syrup-sticky plate behind for her to deal with.

You can practically hear her indulgent sigh even as you nearly bowl over several first years on your way out the door. But hey, the exam’s not going to take itself, and fuck if you’re not going to make Cauchy's theorem your bitch.

On the way out of the science center two hours later, you’re not as completely wrecked as you’d expected. There might be something to the ‘good night’s sleep’ and ‘actual breakfast’ nonsense, or it could just be that you’re incidentally slightly more brilliant than usual for reasons unrelated to your actions. It’s barely noon, with your final meditation class scheduled for three and barre at six. No more normal class, plenty of time to bask in your not-failure.

It’s funny. This exam was kind of the last big-ticket academic issue on the table. For all your posturing and complaining, you’re pretty sure you passed handily, and you did the same with the other two over the course of the semester. Complex analysis isn’t that hard - it’s pretty intuitive, actually - but giving enough of a shit to function in a class that requires independent study to keep up is its own can of hornets.

And you did it.

You pulled it off.

You’re going to graduate. Unless you _really_ bomb the final, or any of your finals, obviously, but your CS classes for senior spring are all softball open-note bullshit and you’re basically done with the short narrative class you’re taking for a fine arts credit, and once you’re done with your PE requirement, as you will be by this evening, you’ll be… really, basically done.

It was weirdly easier to face when you could convince yourself that it wasn’t a certainty.

Now you kind of get it, what Kanaya was going on about earlier.

Graduation looms.

It’s a beautiful sunny day, though, quintessentially spring-y to the point of being obnoxious, so you just sort of stagger through that realization, wedging your hands in the pockets of your jeans and watching a robin stalk predatorially around on the manicured lawn like a feathery little theropod. Three hours to yourself, and no exam-shaped anvil immediately hanging over your head.

Huh.

You stop in the middle of the path, forcing several other students also leaving the science center to veer around you to avoid a collision, and continue to watch the robin for a moment, the sun warm on your face, the breeze pleasant and cool as it ruffles your flannel overshirt. The air smells green with newly mown grass and fresh flowers and ozone.

And the whole scene feels flimsy and unreal and temporary.

How many days do you have left here?

You hadn’t thought to count.

The sheer idea of it makes your stomach lurch uncomfortably, and you shake your head to snap yourself out of it and head for a different dining hall, on the other side of campus from your dorm, closer to the science center than to anything else, where you’re less likely to run into anyone who knows you well enough to try to talk to you.

So much about this semester has been slippery. It _all_ feels slippery in hindsight, and not just because you’ve spent so much of the past four years actively trying to destroy your brain at every possible opportunity to prove that you’re immortal. Unconditionally, thank you very much. A lot of shit you’ve only managed to sort out in the last year. Even the last semester. Friends you wish you’d made earlier. _Friendsish_. Fucking Karkat and his loser boyfriend, the weird but delightful Nepeta girl who always wears cat ears to your human-computer interaction class… you could swear there were more people on that list.

It’s just so completely ridiculous that you had to spend so much time floundering around like an idiot only to actually hit your stride like a few months before this awful school spits you out like a gnawed-on cherry pit. Has spring always looked like this? Have you just been completely fucking blind this whole time?

Lunch rush isn’t quite in full swing yet, and you make a sandwich and find a corner with an outlet. All the better to scroll mindlessly through Reddit and text Terezi and pretend not to be in some kind of weird crisis-state for no reason other than ‘probably passed a math test’.

And it’s fine. It’s completely fine. Except it’s also terrifying, the idea that after this is over, you have no idea where you’re going or who you’re supposed to be or what you’re supposed to do. You’re more frustrated with yourself than anything, because you’ve had four years to figure out what comes next, with a computer science and statistics degree, in theory, but you just… haven’t. Which is dumb, because you like dicking around with computers, and you like numbers, and supposedly this sort of degree is how you make bank in some kind of ritzy office setup and end up with a butler for your butler, but tech job fairs legally qualify as a circle of hell and you’ve never hated anyone as much as you hate most of the other people in your major, which attracts a truly impressive number of unrepentant sociopaths.

 _Boring_ unrepentant sociopaths, _fine_ , pot, kettle, etcetera.

At least you know who you are, here, and it’s someone you kind of sincerely like, even though so much of what goes on at this school is apocalyptically stupid. You have a therapist, and you haven’t answered a call from your awful mom in months, and you’re the cool subversive CS-major who calls people dipshits when they say dipshit things in class, because someone has to do it, and it’s _okay_. It’s great! You’re awesome.

A couple of younger students are having a picnic on the lawn, and you watch them clumsily cut up a plate of red delicious apples and braid each others’ hair.

With the thick panel of glass separating the dining hall from the tableau outside, you could be watching them on some kind of screen. A retrospective on your own first year, in a weird and uncomfortable way. Nothing you ever would have done, even with Kanaya. You were busy with - what the fuck were you so busy with? What used to matter so much?

The thought actually nauseates you, how fake it feels, all of the sudden, and you toss most of your sandwich in the compost on your way out of the dining hall as classes start to let out at twelve thirty and the other seats begin to fill up in earnest.

Terezi doesn’t text you back until a few minutes before your meditation class, when you’re halfway done with a power nap that has you feeling even more disoriented than before and most of the way out the door.

GC: H3Y  
GC: YOU OK4Y?  
GC: TO B3 HON3ST 1 W4S 3XP3CT1NG MOR3 OF 4 TR1UMPH4NT MOOD 4FT3R YOUR 3X4M  
GC: 1V3 N3V3R KNOWN YOU TO TURN DOWN 4N OPPORTUN1TY TO GLO4T 4BOUT YOUR M4ST3RY OF 4DV4NC3D M4TH3M4T1CS >:]  
GC: OR 4NYTH1NG FOR TH4T M4TT3R  
AG: Haha, o8viously I’m doing gr8.  
AG: Not like you’d know what it’s like to fuck the hell out of a complex analysis midterm and not even leave your num8er on the 8edside table after!  
GC: YOUR3 R1GHT  
GC: GOOD  
GC: 1 WORRY 4BOUT YOU SOM3T1M3S  
AG: Well that’s just stupid of you. Don’t you have 8etter things to worry a8out, like eating paint chips and counting your dum8 law school acceptances?  
AG: That’s gotta 8e taking up a lot of your attention!  
GC: V3RY FR3SH M4T3R14L  
GC: 1 4M L4UGH1NG TH3 S4M3 4MOUNT 1 H4V3 3V3RY T1M3 YOU H4V3 TOLD TH4T ON3  
GC: 4ND PROB4BLY GO1NG TO G3ORG3TOWN  
AG: What???????? You didn’t tell me you committed somewhere!!!!!!!!  
GC: Y34H  
GC: 1 4CTU4LLY H4V3N’T TOLD 4NYON3  
AG: Awwwwwwww. Can’t w8 for your supreme court confirmation hearing so I can a8solutely wreck your shit on national television. :::;)  
GC: I’D B3 D1S4PPO1NT3D 1F YOU D1DN’T  
GC: 4NY UPD4T3S ON TH3 JOB S3ARCH?  
AG: I hate everyone in the entire tech industry, especially myself! 8ut like, what else is new?  
AG: Dude, you’re the tits and you know it and every8ody else literally sucks. No need to ru8 it in!  
GC: H3Y  
GC: TH4NK YOU  
GC: 1 LOV3 YOU, YOU KNOW  
GC: 4ND YOU’VE B33N 4 HUG3 P4RT OF MY LIF3 FOR SO LONG  
GC: 1 DON’T KNOW WHO 3LS3 1 G1V3 4 SH1T 4BOUT T3LL1NG  
AG: Thanks for what? Don’t get sappy on me for no fucking reason! You’re going to fancy law school, every8ody knew that was going to happen, shit’s got nothing to do with me.  
GC: M4YB3 1T 1S DUMB  
GC: BUT 1T F33LS L1K3 K1ND OF 4 MOM3NT  
AG: Gross, I’m going to go to my medit8tion class and forget about your lamey lame feelings 8ullshit with the power of my mind.  
AG: I have standards, dude!  
GC: GOOD LUCK F1NDING 1NN3R P34C3  
AG: I’ll find inner peace when I’m dead and in hell!  
AG: Fuck you!!!!!!!!

You close in on the multifaith center where your mediation class meets, and find yourself hanging outside of the door. Partially because you’re not as fashionably late as usual, partially in mild bewilderment at how quickly the conversation stops being enough to make you feel better.

Shit.

AG: 8ut congratul8tions. Like actually congratulations.  
AG: I love you so much.  
AG: Ugh, that was awful! How does anyone say that shit without wanting to scru8 all the skin out of their mouth????????  
AG: Now fuck off and leave me to die in PE class hell this one last time. Don’t 8e too disgusting without me to keep you in line!

The chaplain smiles at you as you enter the chapel, class probably having started about five minutes ago, and you fight the urge to flip him off. This is the last time you’ll sit through this. Maybe the last time you’ll turn your phone off to avoid a barrage of diabetes-inducing texts from your dumb hot best friend. Because who knows what will happen next?

You’ve met you!

And you’re really good at cutting the fuck out of people’s lives when you feel like this. At ghosting Terezi for literal months, pissing her off or getting pissed off yourself over something inane and running away from it like a little bitch and only ever dealing with your shit once she makes an issue of it. And it’s always her who has to fix things, and what happens when she’s a fancy bigshot lawyer with more important things to do and you’re… not sure how to matter anymore?

The class does literally nothing to clear your head, and the chaplain gives a ten minute speech at the end about how much progress you’ve all made over the semester, mentions all ten of you individually by name, and it makes you want to puke.

He says you specifically have shown ‘a noteworthy commitment to improving your focus’, which sounds suspiciously like something both Kanaya and your therapist would say, except he has no fucking right to say that shit like he knows a goddamned thing about how fucking awful you can be and just how much better you are now, because you fucking did that, you saw that, you fixed your shit! So much of your shit!

And it’s still not enough, somehow.

You’re still looking forward and there’s square-fuckin’-one waiting for you once you cross the stage in the cap and gown you haven’t bought yet. All of your shitty old habits and the awful things you know you’ll cave in and go right back to given half a chance.

Fuck.

It’s been a while since you had a real awful mood like this. And you don’t want to talk to Terezi anymore, don’t even want to turn your phone back on, you’re mentally putting together a list of places to hide and wallow in your misery for the few hours until barre.

You decide on the campus center for its proximity to the gym, which turns out to be a bad idea, because you swipe into the dining hall on the top floor and find, of all people, _Kanaya_ sitting at the high top table where you usually sit alone after class.

“Hey,” you say, tossing your bag down, figuring that dealing with her now will be easier than wrestling with the vague disappointment of being a bitch to her and fielding the passive aggressive hurt-feelings that you inevitably imagine her projecting in your direction.

“That bad?” she asks, not looking away from her laptop.

“Nah, the exam went fine. I’m fucking great at math.”

“Glad to hear it,” she says, looking up and smiling at you before returning to what looks like some sort of biology paper.

If you’d figured anyone would have their shit sorted out by the last month or two of senior year, it would have been Kanaya. You’re reminded, though, as you slouch over to fill a cup with coffee and grab a banana, that she kind of hasn’t gotten it together at all. You stopped hearing about her studying for the MCAT and all that stuff a few months back, and she hasn’t gotten back into it that you can see. Like, it’s probably not too dire, since her family runs some kind of hospital or something in Isfahan, and she can just go home if she really needs something to do while she’s waiting for the next round of admissions.

She gets along with her family. Her sister works at some kind of NGO in New York. She’s got basically infinite options, and you’d be jealous - shit, you were jealous for the first few months you knew her! - if she didn’t have a sixth sense for that stuff and wouldn’t strongarm you into accepting charity if she knew you were resenting her for anything more than, like, leaving her dresses around the room sometimes.

But the fact remains that she’s shifted gears a lot, and you sure haven’t heard anything about what she’s doing after all this college stuff wraps up, and that genuinely knots your stomach when you think about it.

Kanaya’s a tricky one to read.

When you’re miserable, whether you like it or not, whether you try to hide it or not, everybody fucking notices and starts treating you weird. Kanaya almost never visibly has a hard time, and when she does, it’s always for some lame reason that doesn’t even have anything to do with her, like she’s absorbing the residual energy of one of Karkat’s bitchfits or else she’s picking up on your vibes and magnifying them weirdly into a knot of passive aggressive tension.

You sit across from her in silence, eat your food, take out your laptop, and watch her surreptitiously while pretending to work on annotations for someone’s moronic submission for your short narrative class.

There’s a clear course of action, here.

Because you’re so achingly benevolent in literally every respect, up to and including waking up every morning to grace the world with your presence, you’ve managed to figure out subtle ways to help Kanaya when she gets all emotionally constipated, even when you seriously can’t tell what the fuck is wrong with her. While it requires a noble sacrifice of time and emotional energy on your part, you are magnanimous to the extreme.

“I feel like shit,” you announce.

She quirks a single eyebrow up, meets your eyes, and otherwise doesn’t react, doesn’t even close her laptop screen.

“For any particular reason, do you think?” she asks.

Like a motherfucking trout to a lure. The dance begins! The age-old tarantella of her trying to pretend she doesn’t want to swoop in and fix your problems and you pretending you don’t want her to swoop in and fix your problems until somebody cracks, usually you, and she gets to meddle to her heart’s content and you get to gripe about the whole thing like you aren’t the puppetmaster behind the situation in the first place.

It always cheers her right up!

“I’m sad,” you declare, summoning up all of your prodigious acting skill at once. “I’m _sad_ , and I don’t want to talk about it!”

“Well, that would hardly be a first,” she says.

“Kanaya,” you say. “You don’t understand. Nobody understands. It’s really hard to be me!”

“Is Terezi not texting you back quickly enough? Poor thing.”

Ouch.

No one said distracting her from her troubles was going to be easy or painless, which is why it’s so goddamned heroic of you to try, but still, ouch.

“I’m dealing with a purely existential struggle, thanks, and if anything, she’s texting me too much, because she wants me, and it’s wearing me out,” you insist, and Kanaya finally closes her laptop and presses her lips together in what is either mild annoyance or deep, abiding affection for you, probably the latter.

“And what, pray tell, is the nature of your struggle?” she says doubtfully.

“I dunno,” you say. “Just stuff ending, I guess.”

“Oh.” Her expression softens. “Your exam.”

Stupid mind reader Kanaya and her stupid brain. This is clearly about her _real_ problems, not the lame fake ones you’re making up to get her to pay attention to you.

“And barre,” you add plaintively. “Karkat and Dave aren’t even going to be there for our last class! I’m distraught!”

She sighs.

“Yes, that sounds like it is very likely the problem.”

“Kanayaaaaaaaa. Come on. You’re killing me, here! Aren’t you the one who’s always like ‘reach out when you need help, Vriska, you dumb bitch’?”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever put it quite like that.”

“But you’ve meant it!” You pause here, waiting for her to argue, but she nods reluctant acknowledgement and gestures that you should continue. Ha! “I just don’t want to be aloooooooone right now.”

“I’m extremely suspicious, but also intrigued,” she concedes with a sigh. “Tell me about your feelings, Vriska.”

“Nope! Can’t right now, I have to go to barre class! But if you get me a pizza, I’ll tell you all of my feelings. All of them! Promise! Bye!”

Rolling out of your seat, you sling your bag over your shoulder and hurry away before she can even sigh in protest. The great thing about being roommates with Kanaya, and also the awful thing about being roommates with Kanaya, is that you literally can’t avoid each other. So she’s stuck with you, now, and you’ve left her with enough of a morsel of your dumb bullshit to take her mind off of _her_ dumb bullshit. And maybe she’ll even buy you a pizza.

Your therapist is going to be so proud of you when you tell her about this brilliant gambit. You’re sure of it!

Barre class, for something that’s occupied such a strange amount of your mental space this semester for some ungodly reason, is completely uneventful. The spaces next to you in the front of the room are conspicuously empty, because the rest of the class knows you well enough by now to give you a wide berth rather than risk getting elbowed in the face, which you do to Karkat a lot, accidentally at first, on purpose by the end of the semester, because it’s funny. Dave has been retaliating lately by surreptitiously trying to yank your mat out from under you mid-plank, because Karkat’s too much of a pussy to try to get you back.

Also, you think Dave might have a bit of a death wish, because how else can you explain the dude willingly messing with you, the sharpest-elbowed fucker who’s ever lived?

It’s okay, actually. He seems like an alright dude, for all Kanaya spends half her time texting Karkat and armchair-therapisting why she thinks he’s depressed or whatever. You can respect a bitch who channels that sadboy energy into absolutely tormenting people who bother his boyfriend. It would be hypocritical if you couldn’t. That’s how you deal with being sad too.

An hour passes, the instructor whips out a plate of brownies and announces that they contain vegetables, somehow, and you take a picture and make a break for it.

AG: Hey fuckface!  
AG: If you and Karkat aren’t too 8usy drawing straws to see who has to top this time, thought you might 8e the only person in the world who could appreci8 how 8ullshit this is.  
AG: IMG_3761  
AG: Guess what’s in the 8rownies Linda m8de????????  
TG: those are brownies  
AG: Strictly in theory.  
TG: no fuckin comment on anything else you just said but that shits fucked yo  
TG: was that the final  
TG: did we miss the final  
TG: seriously was the test whether the class made us healthy enough to live through eating literal slabs of feces  
TG: did she shit those bricks when she realized that barre is fucking sad and pointless and stupid and shes wasted her life  
TG: wait that was mean  
TG: youre rubbing off on me  
TG: i hate that  
TG: but im right  
TG: good fucking riddance to this shitshow  
AG: This is why I don’t text you! You talk so much!!!!!!!!  
AG: They’re apparently asparagus-8ased, though.  
AG: And I’m still recovering from the shock to my delic8 constitution it was to learn that little factoid!  
AG: So try not to 8itch me out if you can handle that.  
AG: My day has been shit enough already.  
TG: vrisky baby im just getting started  
AG: Hell no.  
AG: I literally only wanted to show that to you. If we’re lucky, and I usually am, we’ll never have to interact ag8n!  
AG: Have fun with Karkat, you weird son of a 8itch, m8ke sure you have him 8ack by nine, Kanaya gets fussy when he stays out l8.  
TG: vriskers no  
TG: we were having such a good chat  
TG: vrisky business  
TG: my soul vrister  
TG: vristwatch  
TG: vrist for the mill  
TG: vrisket  
TG: astevrisk  
TG: i can do this all day  
AG: Oh wow. No.  
AG: I h8 everything about this.  
TG: btw karkat says  
TG: uh  
TG: he wont slow down long enough long enough for me to transcribe  
TG: gist is  
TG: he fuckin hates you  
AG: I will NOT play telephone with you losers!  
AG: Tell your dork 8oyfriend to get wrecked.  
AG: For fuck’s sake, hire a mean domme and leave me out of your clusterfuck of a relationship!  
TG: ngl im kinda into it  
AG: Ugh, ew!!!!!!!!

The idyllic spring day has faded into ominous looking stormclouds that roil in the darkening sky as you walk home, and you stuff your phone back into your pocket and ignore the three notifications from Terezi and the way it buzzes for the rest of your walk back to the dorm as Dave blows you up with a goddamned soliloquy of idiotic self-referential memeing, probably.

You really can’t stand him.

You’re smiling because you owned him so hard.

When you get home, there’s a pizza on your end table and your ‘expecting company’ thrifted chairs, most of which Kanaya reupholstered herself, are all set out like you’re actually having a party. You’d almost forgotten your initial ploy, but the setup puts you right back into high gear. It’s extra as all fuck, and possibly the most Kanaya gesture that you can imagine.

You’ve really suckered her into fussing about your feelings over literally nothing!

The greatest trick the devil ever played was flicking the ‘hostess mode’ switch that you’re convinced exists somewhere on Kanaya’s back, and you’ll take that shit to the bank. You are unbelievably awesome, the craftiest bitch in existence, and the fact that this is definitely going to distract exclusively-her from her bullshit is just the cherry on the cake.

“I was promised feelings in exchange for pizza,” Kanaya announces from the floor, and sweet fuck, she’s wearing pajamas and everything.

“Don’t you have class tomorrow?” you say vaguely. “I don’t want to keep you awake and have you off your game in some moronic biology class or something!”

“Shoosh,” she says sternly. “You can’t weasel your way out of this. We’re having a sober feelings-talk.”

“Kanayaaaaaaaa,” you whine, shucking off your leggings and tank top, trading them for your own pajamas. “That’s a completely baseless and unfair accusation. I would never weasel my way out of anything! You’re so mean to me.”

“I’ll have you know that the pizza is pineapple and bacon, you savage excuse for a human.”

“...and I love the way it hurts, babe!”

The hard part about this kind of ploy is that you inevitably have to be at least a little honest, though that’s not as actually-impossible as it used to be. She makes it pretty easy, which is dangerous, because things can slip into ‘too fucking real’ territory pretty fast.

Once you’ve changed into your comfy clothes, you shovel pizza into your face, which helps at first, but then Kanaya ushers you over and starts braiding your hair, which she used to do for you all the time in first year, back when she had this insanely long hair and was always putting it in complicated updos and you got jealous when you couldn’t do it for yourself. You’re an only child! It’s not your fault that you didn’t have a fancy bigshot big sister to teach you to do pretty hair shit.

She’s really good at it, too.

You settle in on her lap, just like old times, and watch her swiftly move through sections of your hair as you chew thoughtfully.

“So,” she prompts. “Existential dread.”

“Pfft. Dread is for losers. I’m talking…….. anxiety. Maybe. At most.”

“Hmm,” she says, letting another braid fall and picking up a fresh strand of hair. “And was it the exam, then? Or the conclusion of your PE classes?”

“I don’t knoooooooow,” you complain, “that’s why I asked you!”

“As difficult as it may be to believe, Vriska, I can’t actually read your mind.”

You groan exaggeratedly.

“You could try!”

She leans over you, which is easy to do from her vantage point, giving you a stellar view of her dumb perfect skin from upside-down.

“I do try,” she says gently.

“Ugh, I know you do, that’s the worst part,” you sigh. “How do you fucking stand me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know! I really don’t know!” You flop back into her lap and frown up at her. “How have I not fucked this up?”

Kanaya laughs.

“You’ve always been very straightforward about what you are and aren’t offering. That’s a quality that I can appreciate. Do you really want me to go on? I can, you know, but you tend to get squirmy when I do.”

“No,” you sigh. “Don’t get mushy. Ugh.”

“Ugh indeed.”

She finishes with the braiding and begins to trace gentle patterns against your hair, which is probably a work of fucking art by now, and just frustrates you, honestly, because this… is this the only thing you’ve ever been able to offer Kanaya? A project? Like, obviously, you’re great, and you’re an awesome roommate, but it doesn’t seem fair. It’s never seemed totally fair, and it’s always been just a little weird, how much she seems to like you, when no one else can stand you in person for more than a few days without kicking you out of their little Barnard dorm after a blowout fight.

You’ve never really fought with Kanaya.

Like, you’ve bitched at her, and she’s bitched back at you, usually in that order, but…

It just doesn’t make sense when you think about it, so you typically don’t if you can avoid it. On and off you’ve convinced yourself that you’re in love with her, but it’s always really confusing and stupid and probably just because you hate it when anyone else tries to horn in on what you’ve got going on here, which is way too fucking good to be true.

Way better than you probably have any right to expect.

And now you’re just supposed to graduate and give this all up and go out into the world and be nothing all over again? Where the fuck are you going to find another Kanaya?

It’s just… it’s just…

“Why didn’t we ever give this… I don’t know, why didn’t we ever try to make us work?” you say, after a few seconds of staring up at her, thinking that your meaning should probably be obvious since she’s got her fingers twined in your hair and she’s looking back at you with some emotion you can’t quite put your finger on.

“Because we were roommates, and at least one of us has always been level-headed enough not to permit our various passions to conflict with our living situation?” she laughs, sidestepping the question entirely, the bitch.

“Bullshit. I’ve never been level-headed in my life. It’s just not my deal!”

“I never said it was.”

You pout dramatically at the slight, and she laughs, leaning in to smooth the freshly-mussed braids from your face. It feels nice. Unfortunately, she seems to take your sigh of relief for one of irritation, and reluctantly withdraws her hand.

Thunder rolls outside, and rain begins to patter soothingly against the window and even more mutedly overhead against the slate roof. She turns away briefly to glance out into the rainy evening, and you nudge her with your head. Less staring aimlessly into the middle distance, more patting your hair!

“We should give it a whirl. It’s senior spring. _Nothing counts_ ,” you announce, a _little_ pathetically, you’re a big enough person to admit that. “Worst comes to worst, you only have to avoid me for like a month!”

To make your point a little more clear, you shift your shoulders around until you can prop yourself up a little in her lap and make what you think is a really impressive effort at kissing her. You miss, because she’s not leaning over you as much as you expected, and awkwardly half-mouth her drapey grey top.

“You’re incorrigible,” she says, bopping you delicately on your nose.

You bite her finger. Gently. She rolls her eyes, and makes it look positively graceful. You absolutely hate that about her. From the goddamned moment that she _wafted_ into your shared barely-more-than-a-broom-closet double in first year, she’s been inescapably and obnoxiously better than you with basically everything she does.

It’s a small comfort that you’ve since become acutely aware that she’s better than pretty much everyone else, too.

“Must we really descend to this level of cliche?” she continues. “The lesbian roommates at the historically women’s college, brought together in the eleventh hour by mutual trepidation at the prospect of post-graduation loneliness?”

“Hey,” you protest. “Is that seriously what you think this is?”

“Is that not seriously what _you_ think this is?” she replies, her tone more curious than remanding.

“No! What, you… dude! I think you’re hot and I’ve fucked people for way less than that, just as a starting point!” you begin, frowning up at her.

She shakes her head, the corner of her mouth tilting up just slightly, an uncommon sort of genuine smile from her. It’s really hard to make Kanaya sincerely enjoy shit, especially when her idea of fun is basically JoAnn’s Fabrics and chill, but like, _literally_ chill, not even with any hand stuff in between the bolts of fabric.

God, she’s infuriating.

“What the fuck is it with hot girls being like ‘oh no, a compliment, muh insecurity’?” you complain. “Everyone but me sucks. I’m the only good hot person. I swear to fuck, maybe I just have a thing for blind chicks. That tracks. Is that is? You blind, Maryam? Would explain some shit. Like how we’re not fucking right now. You’re cradling my fucking head, dude, in case you couldn’t tell.”

“ _Vris_ ka,” she scolds, and you contort within her lap to look up and see her blushing.

“Kan _ay_ a,” you echo, in a pretty solid imitation of her tone.

“I don’t know,” she says, after a second.

You wait for her to gather her thoughts, which is agonizing, but you’re pretty sure she appreciates it.

“You’re right about the existential anxiety. I feel it too. Nothing has felt right for a while,” she murmurs, back to stroking your hair like an old lady absentmindedly petting a cat, and you shift a little to try to make it easier for her to keep on doing that.

“I think I know what you mean,” you say.

“It has nothing to do with you, I don’t think, but it feels as though something has fallen through, like… like I’m waiting on a rejection email from a position I can’t remember applying to, in the strangest way. Like I’ll arrive home at the end of all of this and find that my cat has died in my absence.”

She pauses.

“I don’t even have a cat. What an inane way to make a point. I’m sorry if it sounds as though I’m rejecting you. I’m not. I just don’t know if I have any right to… well, if I’m in the right place for anything. I’m not making any sense, am I.”

“Not really,” you say, frankly but with a whole lot of effort not to be mean, which would be too easy. “But you don’t actually have to know everything, you know. Hell, you don’t even have to fuck me! Though it’d be nice if you could keep messing with my hair. It’s just a stupid time to exist, I think. In between shit.”

“When you’re right, you’re right,” she sighs, and then smiles down at you all over again. “There’s a version of myself from about two years ago who I believe must be tearing her hair out over my hesitation as to the matter of ‘fucking’.”

“Ha, sophomore year, really? You had a thing for me? You were so dumb then.”

“Everyone was dumb in sophomore year. Do you recall attempting to bleach your hair in our shared bathroom and presumably crafting some kind of doomsday chemical weapon down the drain of our sink in the process? An incident that I learned about upon arriving home from class to find our dorm evacuated and emergency services involved?”

“Yeah, and you were into me when I was that bitch. Who’s really the loser, huh?”

“Oh, Vriska,” she sighs. “You’re still very much that bitch.”

You nestle back against her shirt, and she traces meaningless patterns against your forehead with an almost disturbingly feather-light touch. It’s actually ticklish. You struggle not to shiver. She pays attention to that kind of stuff, and she would stop, and then you’d have to straight-up ask her to go back to doing it, which is more than your already bruised dignity can endure.

“We have good memories as well, though,” she adds. “For all it’s become so oddly stagnant, recently, I’ll miss this campus for what we made of it.”

That’s fair. You’ve had some iconic moments. And in the midst of your self-reflection, in the sea of ill-advised parties and futile study sessions by the lake where nothing ever actually got done and Kanaya bailing you out after getting wailed on by a flock of goslings and a million other beautiful fucked-up fragments of the last four years, you remember how hollow you felt, so much like you do now, in the months before you made the drive up to this ridiculous suburb of Boston for the first time.

It was like this. It really was.

This is just how these sorts of things are with you. It sucks, starting all over again, in part because you’ve done it so often and in such shitty ways.

And this has been a really nice couple of years.

Probably the best you’ve managed to scrape together so far.

“There were a lot of times we totally should have hooked up,” you say, in lieu of any of that. “We wasted so much time not smooching it up!”

She laughs and ruffles your hair, piecing apart several of the already loosened braids.

“I wouldn’t call it wasted. Isn’t this better than drunkenly making out at one of our first year parties and never speaking again for the shame of it?”

“God, you were a huge closet case, riiiiiiiight.”

“Right.”

“But you thought about it? Seriously?”

“Of course I did. You’re the only good hot person, remember?”

Rain continues to lash against the windows, the spring storm increasing in ferocity as you look away in an effort to hide the flush to your face.

“Hey, Karkat! Remember when you and Karkat were a whole deal?” you announce, successfully changing the subject. “Man, that was fucked up.”

“Perhaps we should ease off the ‘remembering things’,” she sighs, grimacing. “Karkat and I have both grown from the experience.”

You laugh victoriously. The only foolproof way to get Kanaya un-upset about something she’s upset about is to get her upset about something else, which is basically your whole thing. And it’s working. Ha. You never forgot about your plan! Operation: Distract Kanaya is still in full swing.

“Ha, you managed to farm him off to Dave, well done!” you add, because you sort of can’t stop.

“I truly had nothing to do with that,” she says, frowning down at you. “And still wonder what possessed _you_ to intercede on their behalf.”

The problem is, you don’t know either.

But you don’t exactly want to admit that, so you just shrug and grin up at her.

“My natural magnanimity and aptitude for leadership?”

“Sure.”

Throughout it all, she’s still playing with your hair, so you have exactly zero complaints. The sounds of the storm outside continue to rise, and rain floods down the window, which is sort of loose-set in the sill, since the building is so old, and thunder shakes the panes. At this point, barre doesn’t make you hurt all over anymore, and you just feel warm and happy and content and safe. Which is nice, and kind of new.

It’s easy to pretend that this is the whole world.

“I admire you, I think,” she says softly. “There’s so much I wish I could articulate, but lacking the perfect words, I never really do. I wish I had an eighth of your temerity. That would probably be plenty.”

“It’s not just because you’re hot, y’know,” you say. “I think that stuff about you too. Like. Not the same stuff. Different good stuff. Like you’re always all… sincere. And you make things better. Things are always better with you. In the stupidest ways, too. Sorry, gotta balance out all the compliments. Being friends with you has… well. Yeah. You’ve made me a better person. And I know I’ve fought with you the whole time, but you just… you… I don’t know. I know I don’t deserve you. ”

“Vriska,” she says quietly, like she doesn’t know what else to say.

“I also know it’s lame,” you say quickly.

“It is entirely un-lame.”

Blessedly, you don’t have to respond to that, because a particularly loud peal of thunder seems to shake the building down to its constituent stones and the power cuts out. You really are the luckiest motherfucker alive.

The sudden darkness makes Kanaya flinch, and you press yourself closer to her, taking the moment to shift to almost-sitting so you can lean back flush with her chest.

“You okay?” you ask.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t… know. I… can you… I would prefer it if we had some light, until the generators come on.”

“Hey, no problem,” you say, patting her cheek and scootching away to grope through your big trunk of random bullshit in the dark.

You have a candle that smells like the literal embodiment of the color red that you impulsively shoplifted from a HomeGoods in Natick that you were planning on giving to Terezi, but you decide on an entirely separate whim to break it out now. Some mood lighting!

Kanaya is breathing audibly and deliberately, and you recognize with a frown that she’s trying to stave off a panic attack. Shit. She usually only has those to do with academic bullshit. Time is of the essence.

Digging through your stuff, you find your last remaining lighter - your little plaster skateboard broke and got butane everywhere a few weeks ago, but you still have your favorite, the one with the little cartoon weeds. You hope Kanaya doesn’t blow a gasket when she sees that you still have it, even though she specifically told you not to bring it back to the room when you woke up after the blizzard on that shitshow of a Saturday morning, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

You’ll take a scolding if you have to.

“Here,” you say, as reassuringly as you can manage, which is not very reassuring at all, usually. “I got it.”

“Is that a _candle_?” she says, over her short, measured breaths. “I’m not going to ask why you still have a lighter on your person.”

“Worked out this time, didn’t it?” you retort, flicking the sparkwheel of your lighter and pressing down on the fork.

Somewhere in the distance, the flame takes.

Your vision whites out entirely, tinges weirdly pink at the edges.

Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh fucking shit shit shit shit shit _shit_.

You remember everything.

Months of shit you’d somehow just fucking forgotten, which isn’t even true anymore, you don’t think, as much as you can tell what did and didn’t happen and what is and isn’t true. You remember the last blackout, and you remember being ripped out of this dimension or whatever the fuck, and you remember losing control of your brain and flipping out, and you remember… Rose.

Holy fuck.

You were in the spaceship-looking thing, and then, suddenly, you weren’t.

And she’s. She’s dead? Did he kill her? Un-exist her, somehow, that must be what happened. But you don’t know. What the fuck _happened_? Fuck fuck fuck, you weren’t there, you wouldn’t know, and she’s… well, she was never your best friend, but her and Kanaya, and her and motherfucking Dave, and she’s dead, and they can’t…

It’s brain-meltingly confusing and way too much all at once.

“Vriska?” Kanaya says, a suspended second and somehow fucking months later.

Time isn’t real! None of this is real, or all of it is, and you’re not even sure who you are, or what this means to you, or what this means in general, or if Kanaya fucking dosed your pizza with LSD or some shit, which would be hilarious but not like her, and it feels _real_.

You somehow managed to light the candle, and by the light of the single wick, you can see worry sparkling in her dark eyes as she watches you hyperventilate with the enormity of the shit rewriting itself in your brain.

It’s a split-second choice, here, as she ushers you back to her.

You could decide that none of this is real. Holy shit. If she finds out, if she remembers, she - Kanaya - god, she was stupid-into Rose, it was literally pathetic, it actually upsets you just remembering. You could just throw this away. Get rid of the lighter like she’s always fucking telling you to, hope the light doesn’t come pricking through back into your universe some other way. It doesn’t… it doesn’t feel like there’s anything new coming through, if you had to put your finger on it. What’s done is done. The connection is dead.

But this just spoils so much. It’s fucking sad, because you didn’t really hate Rose, except you totally did, she was a huge bitch, but a _fun_ huge bitch, and… stupid Kanaya has a stupid type. Fine. You liked her.

A non-negligible part of you is kicking yourself, telling you to smash the thing and be done with it.

You have one good thing, and even from beyond the fucking grave, Rose has to reach through and take it back, and it sucks. It fucking sucks.

You’re happy. You’re _happy_. You just made the biggest fucking confession of your life, and you can’t just throw that away, but this would do that, right? This would just cancel it all out. Kanaya doesn’t really need to know that her almost-girlfriend is dead. That’s just sad. You’d basically be protecting her from the pit that grows in your stomach when you think about it.

It would basically just be the compassionate thing to do.

“Is something the matter?” Kanaya asks, crossing her arms shakily, brow furrowing in concern, her own panic forgotten.

Fucking shit.

This is what’s had her miserable all this time. And Dave, too. And even, maybe, a little bit, you, probably, though you really didn’t give a shit about Rose.

“Light it,” you say, thrusting the lighter into her hands. “It’s important. I need to text someone.”

She takes it gingerly, and you look away.

This is awful.

You are such an idiot. A useless, piece of shit idiot who can’t even close the easiest deal on the face of the earth. Actively sabotaging yourself. You’ll deserve everything you get. Fine.

But so will Kanaya, you hope. From a few feet away, you hear her gasp as the lighter clicks, and then choke on the small noise of surprise. She deserves the truth. She does. You can’t hurt her, and you can’t passively let her hurt. You can’t. Not after everything. She has you so fucked up.

_Fine._

One more base to cover.

AG: Dave.  
AG: We need to talk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I will just write longer and longer chapters and then someday if I'm lucky I'll die.


	5. Kanaya: Go home.

Kanaya: Go home.

Terezi crawls out of an empty gear compartment as you walk to the respite bay, and it’s frankly not the most surprising event of the evening, so your first reaction is to nod politely and offer her the glass of water that you had been planning to bring to Rose.

“Thanks,” she says hoarsely, accepting it with both hands and downing the entire thing as though she’s had nothing to drink in quite some time.

There likely aren’t abundant options in the gear receptacle, to be completely fair.

“Of course,” you say, accepting the empty glass and offering her your hand, in case she would like to not be stuffed in what is barely more than a reinforced steel cabinet anymore.

She stares at your hand with mild confusion, then leans forward and licks your palm. Oh, right. This is going to take some getting used to. When you last met with Terezi, not only was she oddly distant and perfunctory, _you_ were practically frenzied with concern over Rose’s impending disappearance. That was deliberate on his part, of course. The two of you have never been especially close; even on the meteor, she was far more Vriska’s moirail than anything more than a fond acquaintance to you, and you were occupied with… other matters, besides.

Your hand is sticky now, and buzzes slightly, as though she might still have battery acid in her mouth.

Before you can really react to that development, she reaches up with a spindly wrist and grasps your offered appendage. In the first real test of your newly reattached arm, you hoist her from the compartment, easily depositing her in the hallway. She sways on her feet, and you grip her by the elbow until you trust her to remain upright.

“I’m fine,” she says, then immediately steps into the wall, knocking her red sunglasses free from the bridge of her nose.

“It may take a while to acquaint yourself with the layout of the ship,” you warn her. “The floorplan is quite different than that of the craft in which you’ve been traveling for all this time.”

“Time,” she mutters.

“Yes. Several months, if I understand correctly. Time flows differently in paradox space, but it flows all the same. Jake and I have thus far found it meaningful and somewhat reassuring to ground our sense of linear movement in its passage back home.”

“It figures, I guess,” she says, straightening herself out with visible effort. Precarious though she is, she is able to stand on her own two feet.

“The general concept of time… figures?”

“I’ve heard enough about it in the last two months to fill a lot of really stupid books,” she replies.

“Ah. I can imagine,” you say, wrinkling your nose in sympathy.

You’ve more or less hit your capacity for convoluted orations on the subject, and most other subjects, for the day. At least until you get some sleep. It shouldn’t be this difficult to process massive and jargon-filled spiels on incomprehensible subjects. In fact, you once considered it a particular talent of yours, skating over unfamiliar words and phrasing, extrapolating from what you _do_ understand to parse meaning from even the most truly convoluted digressions on your wife’s part. You’re out of practice, after so long with only you and Jake alone in the vastness of paradox space. He’s quick to admit that he’s never been the monologuing sort on any topics but those of terrible movies and his ships, and despite an initially dependable stream of questions on the topic of Dirk And Nothing Else, he’s gone precipitously quieter over the weeks in your company.

In a shocking twist, for the first time in your life, you have become responsible for filling extended moments of disconcerting quiet with your own thoughts. This has never been your ‘thing’, and the months you’ve passed unwillingly put in the position to be forthcoming or to be content with silence have done nothing to increase your appreciation of the activity.

Terezi raises her face, adjusts her glasses, and breathes deeply, as though she’s trying to outcompete the ventilation system. Or, more likely, get a sense of her surroundings.

“Did you just bring the smallest ship you could find on this rescue mission, or what?” she asks.

“The fastest,” you correct her, shallow claws of resentment sinking themselves into your chest for all you will them not to. “Speed over comfort, if you can forgive us for hoping to retrieve our loved ones and put a stop to a universe-scale genocide in potentia as quickly as possible.”

You try to rein it in, reminding yourself that Terezi didn’t choose this any more than you did. You’ve all survived something truly terrible, something indescribably traumatic, and it would be cruel to allow your muddled feelings about the events of the last day to adversely impact the way you treat her. She’s an old friend, for all that she’s never been an especially close one.

“I guess,” she sighs, crossing her arms in moderate agitation. “I get it, I mean. I… ugh, do you have anything to eat on this thing?”

“Certainly,” you sigh _right back_. “Up in the control room. Follow me, I’ll fix something for you.”

You were hoping to get some rest, and… why deny it, you were hoping to check in on Rose, as much as the idea of facing her, of truly knowing whether the metaphysical cat in Schrodinger’s box is alive or dead, constricts your heart with anxiety. That’s an odd and very _human_ analogy to spring so readily to mind, and you frown, setting it aside in favor of the more immediate and less unsettling matter at hand.

Terezi trails a few feet between you as you usher her through the narrow halls and back to the control room, where you’ve left the ship on autopilot - not excessively dangerous for brief intervals, since you’ve verified the craft’s functionality, save for the damaged communications systems. Outside, through panels of reinforced transparent material the molecular identity of which Jake will cheerfully rattle off given the slightest provocation, the darkness of paradox space makes up the entirety of the all-consuming horizon, coal-black and claustrophobic.

She pales as she approaches.

You wonder idly what the seemingly infinite and impermeable darkness, dotted with oblique and distant universal bodies, smells like.

“Here,” you say, opening a cupboard of recently-alchemized supplies. “Can I offer you anything in particular? The alchemizer onboard is not a perfectly comprehensive device, as concessions have been made for space and power limitations, but I’d be happy to attempt to provide anything you might like.”

She takes a fresh vessel of water, a carton of peanut butter, and a small bottle of dried oregano.

You’re past being surprised at Terezi’s dietary choices.

“I think I’ll head back to the… closet,” she says, nostrils flaring as she seems to glance between you and the large viewing port. “If that’s okay.”

“Certainly,” you say. “And now that you know where to find it all, you’re welcome to take anything you need, of course.”

“Cool,” she says, edging away.

You’re leaving in the same direction that she is, and you sigh at the awkwardness of all of this. Everything has changed so much, and even the company of a familiar face from your childhood is insufficient to alleviate your rising sense of unease in your own flesh, in what you _are_ now that the frantic endeavor to rescue your wife is concluded.

Is it really over?

The prospect of answering that question terrifies you.

Perhaps it's because you know the answer. Because she _told_ you the answer, because you saw her lifeless body, because this Rose is not your Rose, and what remains of your Rose believes that she left you of her own volition, deliberately chose _Dirk Strider_ over you, no matter how impossible that is for you to comprehend. 

Even then, even after all of that, the ghost of the woman you married is buried in some unrecognizable entity of inconceivable power.

You force yourself to calm your breathing, to collect yourself before you descend via an untenable path. 

It would be egregiously unfair to make these judgements without consulting her.

But your uncertainty terrifies you.

You thought it would be over. That you might have to bring her back from the precipice of madness or illness, from her father’s control, that her experience would be like your own. That was foolish of you. Rose has always charted her own path. That’s part of what you admire about her. What you respect, what you love. She capitulates to no one.

What cuts through your heart, now, is the worry that you simply don’t know her as well as you thought. Not only the entity that she has become, but who she was to begin with. Wasn’t it presumptuous of you, believing that you could _understand_ her?

“Terezi,” you say, anxiety stewing in your chest. “What can you tell me about the… about your experience of the journey on your own craft? If you know, by any chance, what exactly was… happening?”

Halfway back into the gear locker, her provisions tucked beneath her boney arms, Terezi glances up, and unnervingly, you register the sensation that she can see you all too well.

“A lot of unbelievably obnoxious nonsense-monologuing, mostly,” she says, shrugging. “Neither of them are any good at shutting up, and putting them on a spaceship together was like… feedback from two microphones smashed together. The volume of depressing metanarrative psychobabble coming from both ends of the ship was deafening. I had a headache for a solid two weeks before I figured out where the best insulated hiding compartments were. Most normal-sized ships actually have more than one, y’know.”

You ignore the dig at your ship - you really have developed an affection for the thing, you suppose - and frown at the rest.

“She must have been so lonely,” you say.

“I guess. He dragged the rest of us down with him, and not just with the sticky colored text. By the end, they were starting to smell the same. It’s hard to tell the difference between lavender and orange peel when they’ve both been decaying in the back of the fridge for too long.”

“Oh.”

“Uh, is that all?”

“...is he dead?” you ask, figuring that she’ll probably give you more of a straight answer than Rose, who, even as you remember her, was more or less allergic to the things.

She flinches.

“He’s gone.”

“But is he _dead_?” you repeat.

It didn’t seem quite clear. You half expected it to be him rather than Terezi following Rose back onto your craft with the collapsing universe behind them. She seemed ready to forgive him. Like perhaps she already had, like ceasing to represent an immediate and categorical threat to your lives was somehow sufficient penance for destroying them so thoroughly.

“Dying has a smell. I know what that… no,” she says, expression unreadable behind her glasses. If you weren’t so exhausted, so worn out on all of this, you would press her further on that, try to make some sense of her feelings. In your present condition, though, you nod along politely and file the potential for meddling away for future reference. “As the universe disintegrated itself and him, there was some kind of. Light. Something. The event horizon of the collapsing universe was _eclipsed_ by light, and… he was gone.”

You blink, unsure what to make of that information. Seers!

“Thank you, I suppose,” you say.

“Yeah, I’m gonna eat now,” she replies, and shuts the door behind her.

 _Why did you go with him?_ you want to ask. _Why did she go with him?_

The sound of dried leaves of oregano crunching makes it clear that you’re not going to get any further answers from this particular source. You return to the control room, fill a fresh glass with water, check in on the ship’s course, and retreat to the respite bay.

For a long moment, you stare at the entrance, wondering if you should knock.

If the only person sleeping were Jake, you wouldn’t, and so you don’t. Normalcy is good. You don’t want to give the impression that you’re tiptoeing around Rose, however fair that conclusion might be. You want, so badly, for her to be resting easily in her bunk, for her to be precisely as you remember her on your wedding night, when you were both nearly too exhausted to undress, let alone to do more than hold each other, reflect on the day, and fall asleep. Frankly, you would settle for any of the quiet nights before she began to drift… not away, but out of herself, months ago.

But you press in shoulder-first, and find something entirely new.

Both she and Jake appear to still be asleep, though the room is several degrees warmer than the outside hall, and illuminated thoroughly by golden-white light emanating from _both of them_. It smells of ozone and spring flowers and fresh cotton, which should be a pleasant departure from the recycled air flowing through most of the spacecraft, but proves phenomenally unsettling in practice.

Jake is snoring softly, an asynchronously small noise for such a physically imposing man. Rose is silent. As you draw closer, you can see that much of the light is pulsing from beneath her eyelids, throwing their ruddy web of capillaries into stark relief.

He wakes up first at your intrusion, yawns and stretches to the extent that he can, obstructed by the proximity of the walls, and smiles sleepily over at you.

“G’morning, my friend!” he says, and you can feel it, somehow, in your bones, like you’re cloaked with warmth from the inside out.

You don’t actually want to be feeling like this - you know, intellectually, that it isn’t _real_ , that the scene is as novel as it is unsettling - but you find it impossible to resist.

Jake seems to register your discomfort, and dims a few watts, grinning sheepishly.

“Oops, don’t mean to get carried away, there,” he tells you. “I’m feeling fresh as a daisy and ready to take the helm! I’ll turn over the bedclothes if you like, since we’re all sharing and whatnot, and I figure that’ll give you some peace and quiet while you change, and then we’ll be good to go?”

From her bed, roughly coinciding with the dwindling glow of hope-and-something-else, Rose begins to stir.

You swallow.

“Yes, that would be excellent,” you reply, after a second, wondering whether it would be appropriate to watch her, feeling agonizingly as though you’ve _interrupted something_ between them.

“Great! I daresay, the best I’ve slept in a long time,” he adds, easily stripping the sheets and the blanket from the bunk, ushering you out as he nearly hits his head on the low ceiling, a consequence of the confined space to which you’ve bourn witness many times since your journey together began.

Back in the hall, you force yourself to even your breathing and slip into your sleep clothes, setting the glass of water down in the process. Jake carries out a pile of laundry a few seconds later, salutes, and hurries off towards the control room with a spring in his step.

You make another attempt to steel yourself, retrieve the water, and walk back in.

The first thing you notice is that he’s done a good job making the bed. Oddly enough, once you were past the initial barrage of microdissections of everything Dirk had ever done or said or _implied_ , most of which you were forced to tune out for the sake of maintaining your temper, Jake was quite eager to acquire basic household skills, including mitered corner folds and the fine art of actually washing linens rather than appearifying new ones each time, the horror and excess of it.

Before you can slip gratefully into bed, you turn, take a final breath, and face Rose at last.

She is still glowing, but softly, still golden rather than characteristically purple. Her eyes are open, and no longer overwhelmed by pure light. Oddly glassy, though, and not quite focused on you.

“I thought you might be thirsty,” you say, and offer her the water.

“Thank you,” she says, accepting the glass, and if she registers the wariness in your tone she doesn’t comment on it. “You ought to be careful. Someone could make an innuendo out of that, and the answer would be… yes.”

Then, peculiarly enough, she giggles.

You are struck with the suspicion that she is intoxicated in some way.

“I apologize,” she continues, taking a long sip of the water, careful not to spill it on herself. “I… there’s a pronoun, isn’t that exciting? I… can’t believe you married me. Your eyes… have I told you this? Your eyes belong on the prow of a trireme. I would lay down my weapon at the sight of them, for awe and for the fear that I might damage something so perfect. Is that… have I said that before?”

“I don’t believe you have,” you say quietly, unsure how to process any of this.

“Good,” she murmurs. “Good, you know, there’s no originality to be had in… anything I say is a permutation among permutations of millions of thoughts, so many of which have gone unvoiced… but for the moment, I am… _a_ me. Probably not the one you’d prefer that I be. I really… I’m sorry. It’s overwhelming enough when they’re sequestered like this, and it’s already falling apart... I thought about saying that to you so many times, but it wasn’t _you_. Does that cheapen it? I imagine it does. Can you forgive me for that? It’s still… true. If I could show you… I wish that I could show you the enormity of how true it is. Really, objectively, quantitatively, in every iteration, in every universe, your eyes alone could enkindle revolutions and beguile gods.”

She takes another sip of water, though somewhat less deliberately, and chokes on it, her nonsensical pronouncements interrupted briefly by sheer inability to speak.

You still don’t know entirely what to make of the situation, and rather than say something foolish, you opt to say nothing. An unignorable part of you is grateful beyond measure just to hear her voice, wants nothing more than to lay your head on her lap and listen to her speak and _touch_ her, you miss her touch so badly. But the longer she speaks, though her words ring familiar if disjointed, the less you recognize her.

Her cheeks are too sharp, her eyes more brownish than purple, once the glow has subsided. Her face and what you can see of her arms is dotted with freckles; she doesn’t spend enough time outside for that, as much as she would protest that claim, or at least its spirit, were you to bring it up. Her hair is longer than you remember, and the way she smiles at you, her gaze oddly feverish, is… you think she’s probably looked at you that way before, but not any time recently.

It’s been a long while, you remind yourself, since your wife was not actively at the brink of death.

This is nothing new, and this is entirely new, and this is her, and this is not her, and you’re too _tired_ to process these emotions coherently, but you can’t stop staring at her face for long enough to get into bed.

How many times did you imagine this, her, safe, here with you, in this exact place? How many times did you envision slipping into the bunk beside her, not minding the limitations of the space or paying heed to anything but _Rose, Rose, Rose_ , with you again after so long apart?

It has a wrongness to it, this thought, now. The same unnerving distruth as a fantasy about an acquaintance you don’t know familiarly enough to justify intimate thoughts. Thinking that about her, as though she’s someone you don’t _know_ , makes you sick. (Do you know her?)

“I’m sorry,” she says, and you realize that she’s been repeating it for some time. “ _That’s_ true, I promise that much is true.”

“Can you tell me, really, why you did it?” you ask, allowing the words you’ve kept sheltered in the back of your conscious mind for so long to flow out. “I need to understand, before I can… I don’t _understand_ , and I had hoped that we were past that, me gazing up at you with uncomprehending wonder, or… fear, I suppose. You - she - if you are all of them, please tell me why she left. Spare no detail for my feelings. As always, I want the truth.”

Rose has always been a beacon of what genuinely _is_ , circuitous as she often can be about _communicating_ the actuality of your shared universe and the paths leading both forward into light and away into obscurity.

Her expression twists, and the golden glow purples slightly, then dims even further.

“There are,” she begins, her tone labored, “three pillars of canon. Truth is of foremost importance among them, as what is canon must be internally consistent with the ideal, but relevance and essentiality properties, while auxiliary, bind what is absolutely true with what is mutably canon. Our universe arrived at an inflection point, specifically with regard to relevance. One that I could no more choose than I could decide the outcome of a coin toss. I could only _know_ , and what I knew was clouded, deliberately, by… what I now recognize to be my father’s influence. I still struggle to attribute his… to believe that he meant me the harm that he ultimately inflicted, but that may be a product of my own lack of clarity. Much of what he was able to leverage about me was entirely my own. A sense of self-imposed loneliness, of being misunderstood and lacking some fundamental ability to understand others. That’s always what it comes down to, isn’t it? Understanding.”

“You felt that I did not understand you,” you say quietly, once her pause has sunk too painfully into your bloodpusher to remain silent.

“I…” she struggles with that for another moment of agony. “I can’t say how much of that was… me. But I am masochistically inclined to attribute my failings as a partner entirely to myself, despite abundant exculpatory evidence to the contrary. I don’t want you to forgive me. How ridiculous is that?”

“Intensely ridiculous,” you inform her.

“I should be furious with him,” she adds.

“Yes, you should.”

“But I’m the one who _bought it_. I’m the patsy, once again, lulled by some metatextual demiurge into fomenting my own destruction. It keeps happening. At what point do I grow out of this? He was right, is the thing. This is a fact of me, that I do this, that I grasp at power before I can comprehend it, that I make these mistakes and make collateral casualties of those foolish enough to care for me, to believe in me. First Dave, then John, then _you_ and - why not throw another Dave or ten in there? _Vriska_ , apparently?”

Her tone rises to an unsettling intensity, then shifts abruptly, along with her expression, from wide-eyed frustration to a sort of muted frown.

“Alright, let’s take five, that’s getting out of hand,” she says tiredly.

“I beg your pardon?” you interrupt. “What - Rose, what was that?”

“She wanted the reins, and she’s well-developed enough to… do that, so I permitted it, and now I’m revoking that permission until we can get a handle on the utter deluge of bullshit going on over there. Wow, I’m really wishing I took more psych classes. It’s going to take some very dedicated therapistery to even begin to pry open that metaphysical can of horrorterrors.”

“But she believes that her… that I’m some kind of fool for having loved her. For still loving her.”

“To be completely fair, she believes a lot of incomprehensible and internally contradictory nonsense in the process of punishing herself as much as possible for a set of circumstances over which she had minimal control at best. It’s always been a talent of ours.”

“And you are…”

“All of them, but significantly myself. I, ah, I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced, beyond Dirk’s description of me as a… fourth year biology student, which is not inaccurate. But this was my body, and as the natively embodied consciousness, I do have some determinative capacity over this entity, but it’s far from absolute. While your wife is the most prominent of my secondary selves, she isn’t the only one. There are infinite iterations of her attached to her self, and an even more sprawlingly infinite array of selves bound more broadly to our fate and our agency-in-kind. That’s about the best that I can do in terms of exposition. Yesterday, in terms of most popular linear conceptions of time, I was more preoccupied with my GRE results than with any of this. She’s taught me a great deal, but the process is incomplete.”

You decide not to ask about the unfamiliar abbreviation.

“It’s really not an acronym worth knowing. I honestly wish I could forget it myself. Fuck. Sorry,” she says, wincing.

“You can read my mind.”

“It’s… well, yes, but I’m making a concerted effort not to, if that’s worth anything to you,” she explains, as you cross your arms in discomfort, both wracking your brain for any untoward or unpleasant thought you might have inadvertently cast her way and trying very hard not to do that. “I can see what you would have said, or what you want to say, when I’m looking, because all thoughts… most thoughts, at least, are passive manifestations of personal truth, speech-in-potentia. Dirk had a different way of doing it. Thoughts as an artifact of one’s essential embodied being, in rote materialist practice. And he is an _ardent_ materialist, as far as theory of mind is concerned.”

This is a familiar habit of Rose’s, that once she begins on a tangent, she finds it nearly impossible to stop. You decide to intercede on her behalf, as you often have in the past, and interrupt.

“So the effects of ascension are aspect-contingent.”

“That’s my theory,” she says, sagging back into her pillow with palpable relief.

She hasn’t resumed glowing yet, and looks more exhausted by the second. Not quite in the way that you remember, the dark circles and the slow thinning of her face and limbs, but as though the weight of the conversation is impossibly heavy and, despite the lightness of her tone, she _despairs_ of it, somehow.

“Neither… or, none of you, I suppose, have answered my question,” you sigh. “As unsurprised as I am by this turn of events, I would appreciate a coherent explanation as to what you hoped to accomplish by following Dirk on an expedition to create and summarily destroy a new universe, if speculation is to be believed?”

“Would it be acceptable if I offered my interpretation?” she suggests.

Her as a composite entity is better than nothing.

“Yes,” you reply, once you’ve ascertained that she doesn’t seem to be acting on your unspoken assessment.

She frowns vaguely, but she isn’t making that expression _at_ you, or really at anything. Just up, at the ceiling, as intensely as though she’s looking through the reinforced steel hull somehow. Rose, as you remember her, has never slept on her back. She tends to fold herself into a posture that protects her soft vital organs, which you’ve always considered very sensible of her. Humans are fragile, particularly their sparsely-armored thoraxes. Vertebrate mammals are remarkably poorly thought-out, and that’s a fact of which you are entirely confident, for all you’ve ended up married to one.

“As she mentioned, Dirk easily leveraged our basal insecurities. Among them, the fear that you found it a burden to care for… me, to understand me. You’ve succeeded where no one else has on both of those fronts without being my genetic relative, and on top of it all you _love_ me, or her, or, well, you know. It seems too good to be true. Seriously, I just spent the last couple of months pining over… an instantiation of you. I believe that, as she ascended, she began to see, with painful insight, the universes in which she failed you devastatingly, or frightened you away, or never had the chance to love you in the first place. This made it easier for her to characterize a truly idiotic set of actions as _altruistic_. As though she was protecting you from some truth of her.”

“As though I wanted protection,” you interrupt bitterly, and she nods tiredly.

“Like I said, unfathomably stupid. Did I say that yet? I meant it, regardless.”

She looks over at you, after a second, expression somewhere close to apologetic. Her eyes were definitely not this pink-rimmed and unfocused when she first awoke.

“You should lay down,” she adds. “This may take a while, if I know my own proclivities for exposition, and I do know those, if I know anything.”

That almost makes you laugh.

“I’d just as soon not fall asleep partway through.”

“Tomorrow will suffice for explication. I can pick up where I leave off. I regret to say that I’m fading quickly myself. Independently holding a self together, even a single embodied consciousness or the facsimile of one, requires… effort, a great deal of it.”

Reluctantly, you climb into the opposite bed, not wanting to admit what a relief it is to relax into the fresh sheets. The lack of sopor slime would be a problem, but the bunk includes a fold-down device that fits seamlessly against your chest, wet and cooling in a way that turns your ocular membranes unwieldy if not quite bringing on the immediate unconsciousness of a proper cocoon.

“It helped his case,” she tells you, as you nestle into the mostly-adequate accommodations, the weight of the last day finally off your shoulders if not off your mind, “that he was correct. Not about me, actually, but about our metanarrative situation, potentialities rapidly narrowing to a single apparent course. We were veering away from a future that could be described as canon, or more accurately from our position _as_ canon, for all that means anything to anyone. I could feel it happening even before he came to me. Or. Er. To her? At this point, the designation hardly matters. Suffice to say, there were significant existential questions about the future of Earth-C as we know it, and more broadly, about what Earth-C and what we would _mean_ in whatever world succeeded ours. In a sense, these questions remain. I think I know how to answer them, though. Increasingly, I believe I have the means to anchor us firmly in… relevance, from which we’ve been lapsing. In theory.”

“Tell me about it,” you say drowsily. “Truly, Rose, I just want to know what’s going on. It would be a kindness to me, to…” 

“I will,” she says. “When I know, I will.”

“One last time, in… in fewer words, why did you leave with him?” you murmur, fighting the exhaustion of all that’s happened.

While pure _worry_ for her and for her present state is fast eclipsing your concern for such comparatively unimportant pursuits as making sense of the origin of your straits and the existential fate of your relationship, you haven’t forgotten how desperately you want to understand this particular aspect of the situation. And so much truly depends on the answer.

“I thought he would save us,” she says, after a lengthy pause, and you hear her shift to watch you from her bunk. You cling to the sound of her voice, dull and unsettlingly weary though it is, as you can no longer keep your eyes open. “I was wrong. I can do it myself.”

You succumb to an uneasy sleep before you can ask her what the _fuck_ she means by that, and you dream of a field of lavender burning to ashes in a torrent of flame.

The next day proves to be even more disorienting. You awaken alone in the respite bay, as has been typical for the last month and a half, and you wonder, for a moment, whether the whole situation has been its own sopor-fueled hallucination. It seems possible, gazing over at the neatly made bed across from you, that Jake’s voice will momentarily sound over the intercom, reporting minimal but nonegligible progress in chasing down Dirk’s ship and suggesting ‘a bit of grub and gab between pals before switching shifts’, as is his typical practice.

No such thing. The intercom is silent as you extricate yourself from the sopor well, toweling your chest and upper arms dry with a corner of the sheets, folding them up preemptively for laundry, one of the many tasks you share to break up the mind-numbing monotony of seemingly endless travel in paradox space.

At first, you had been concerned that your quarry would pull some sort of untraceable maneuver to throw you off, and kept vigilant watch at the console even when it wasn’t your shift to be sure that nothing was awry. He never did, though, exhibited no irregular flight patterns, might as well have had a spectacularly boring robot at the helm, and you came to the conclusion that he must be searching for something, or else uninterested in throwing you off his tail. Possibly both.

You shared these thoughts with Jake and with the other vessels, once you had the opportunity. It’s currently the most popular going theory, or it was, before the craft in question slowed to a standstill and disappeared from the map, and… everything else happened.

Hopefully, soon enough you’ll be able to get back online with the others and straighten the whole matter out. Worry as to how your friends - Karkat and Dave in one ship, Roxy and Jade in another - have been faring has been occupying a significant portion of your already overburdened thinkpan.

“Good morning!” Jake announces, when you’ve dressed yourself and made your way out to the control room, his preferred greeting whenever either of the two of you are fresh-awoken, meaning you’re grown used to hearing it at least twice daily.

“Good morning to you as well,” you say, glancing around, wondering where Rose and Terezi could be.

“You’re just in time!” he adds, gesturing to indicate that Rose _is_ present, though somewhat unexpectedly in the co-pilot’s seat, when you know for a fact that she’s never had an interest in these sorts of vessels.

Perhaps this is another new development that you’ve missed.

“Jake is teaching me the basics behind flight in paradox space,” she says, twisting in the harness of seatbelts to smile up at you. “I’m afraid I’m not quite as apt a pupil as you apparently were.”

“Ah, don’t go counting yourself out just yet, my friend. Kanaya comes by her talents quite naturally. You’ll recall that we were speaking about the internal set of mostly redundant but fabulously useful gyroscopic doohickeys that allow us to maintain any kind of course? Well, the appellation ‘ _space_ craft’ is actually quite on the nose!”

You’ve heard this explanation before. You have an intuitive sense of the ship’s function due to your affinity for spatial positioning and correction, the presence of which in Skaianet’s technology is owed to Jade’s founding role and her personal and aspect-related influence on much of the internal development process. Where someone else guiding the craft would be forced to rely on the console’s translation of the sensory and extrasensory output provided by the devices positioned throughout the hull and within the steering equipment, you can feel the craft’s relationship with its destination when you have your palms pressed to the steering device due to the nature of your own relationship with the concept of space itself.

Jake observed, fairly quickly once you got the hang of things, that the ship seemed to _like_ you.

“...anyway, sorry to go on so terribly, I imagine this stuff is frightfully dry compared to all the juicy metaphysics and whatnot you like to get up to! But I figure it might help, having some idea of the basics. Now, if you’re in a position to take the helm, Kanaya, I was really hoping to get out and have a look at the communications system?”

“Hence my impromptu lesson in spaceship stewardship,” Rose adds.

“Yes, and I’m sure Kanaya is an even more capable flight instructor than myself!” Jake continues blithely, standing up and ushering you into the pilot’s seat. “Would you be willing to hold her steady at her current coordinates?”

“Of course,” you say, trying not to be too stunned by any of these developments.

Rose looks, for lack of a more descriptive set of words, extremely well. The exhausted tension to her voice and her expression has disappeared entirely, and you’re almost certain that the otherworldly glow to her complexion has returned, though it’s more difficult to tell beneath the harsh lights of the control room. You wish that her good health and general composure didn’t strike you as so unsettling.

“I’ll be honest; I never expected to do anything like this,” she says, laughing quietly as she gazes out through the viewing port.

Through the thick-panelled glass, you watch along with her as Jake, changed into his god-tier uniform, flashes a pair of finger guns at the two of you, mouths something inaudible and indecipherable, and floats over to the mangled metal fibers that used to provide between-craft communications with a toolbox in hand.

“Nor did I, frankly,” you say, since it seems like you’re just going to sit here and have a casual conversation, and odd as that is, you’re not going to turn down the opportunity. “Karkat and Equius traded off at the helm in our session.”

“Right,” she says, like she’s trying to remember having been there herself. “It would be even more difficult if I hadn’t been forced to learn to drive a car, I mean, a human terrestrial motor vehicle, of which I’m sure you’ve seen a few. Dave flat-out wouldn’t do it, refused to get behind the wheel, and I dragged my heels as well, though eventually the inconvenience of the situation superceded my stubbornness and I put my head down and learned for both our sakes. I was never especially good at it, though.”

“That doesn’t seem possible,” you say.

“Oh, I’ve been very careful not to let you in on my shortcomings. It’s a fairly fundamental thing I do. You’ve never witnessed me in the act of consuming a chicken wing or tying a complicated knot, have you? I’m _comically_ inept.”

Again, as with last night, you get the same impression that you did when Rose was consuming human soporifics. She is speaking from somewhere slightly outside of herself, missing some pivotal intermediary between her thoughts and her words.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “You’re not going to say anything about it, but you’re correct. I’m delaying certain less palatable components to ascension, and my methods for doing so are not tenable in the long term. I prefer myself this way, I think, but I fear that I won’t be able to find myself back here once I take it all on.”

You blink.

“Jake,” you say slowly, searching for a suitable means of expressing your - not suspicions, but…

“Is helping,” she supplies. “While I get my bearings.”

That is not even slightly reassuring. She barely winces, then turns back to the viewing port, so you’re fairly certain she heard you.

Good.

Several fraught moments pass as you consider what you want to say to her. How worried you are - how can you express your sincere, gut-wrenching worry without coming off as meddlesome? Each scenario you play through ends in some way unsatisfactorily.

“It’s selfish,” she says abruptly. “I know it is. Tremendously so. But I’ve lost so much already. I’m terrified to lose _myself_ , Kanaya. There are so many potentialities of me with habits far less flattering than messy chicken wing consumption and small-motor ineptitude. But after having set so much in motion, there will be no turning back. I am simply treading water until I remember how to swim, or else until the current becomes too strong.”

“It is selfish,” you agree. “I understand, though. I don’t want to lose you either, Rose.”

“But you already have. And you’ve survived it.”

“Please don’t continue on this tack. You are welcome to leave certain aspects of your present relationship with reality unexamined. I merely ask that you permit me the luxury of doing the same.”

She nods vaguely, not really looking at you or anything in particular.

“I’m constructing failsafes,” she says into the ether. “Once that is complete, I’ll face what remains of myself without an intermediary. I want to do the inverse of what he did. I will need to prepare you all to stop me if necessary, as best I can.”

Your throat tightens.

“What, exactly, does that entail?”

“Many of us have the capacity to gain similar levels of mastery over, at the very least, our selves, if not the nature of reality itself. Particularly, I wonder if there weren’t several layers of ulterior motive involved in the decision to take Jake out of commission so thoroughly. And when it comes to you, and Dave, who know me well enough to recognize troubling changes in my behavior, I want you to… be equipped to do what must be done.”

“You are speaking in vagueries again, Rose.”

To be honest, you are getting very frustrated with the circuitousness of every conversation you have even attempted to have with her thus far, and just as much with yourself as with her. There is a chance that you’ve merely lost your touch in dealing with your wife’s conversational machinations. She has always been difficult to nail down. You used to pride yourself on doing exactly that, understanding her meaning from the deluge of complicated language in which she typically cloaks it.

But of course, it would be far less difficult if she would answer a question sensibly, once, perhaps for the first time in her life.

“For now, I’m describing vague things very specifically,” she suggests, with a sort of tight-mouthed smile that highlights just how much her vibrancy has dimmed since you began your conversation. “I do wonder how I’ll get any of this across to our friends, who weren’t even present to bear witness to all that’s happened since we parted.”

She glances out the viewport to where Jake is wrestling with a soldering gun roughly the size of a semiautomatic rifle.

“Well,” you say, finding yourself abruptly on the defensive. “I attempted to send a few transmissions, hoping to elucidate the situation, while you were resting. None passed through, but they… will, once Jake’s work is complete.”

You can feel the equilibrium of the ship’s inner workings shifting slightly as a backdrop to the conversation, a confluence of timbres previously just slightly out of synchronization, reconverging as spatially vital components are rejoined and repaired.

“Oh,” she said.

“Were you not… aware of that?” you ask.

“My awareness has been invested in a number of other functions,” she says. “I just hadn’t considered that I wouldn’t be the one to tell him. I’m sorry, you’ve done nothing wrong, you know, I understand relaying information as a means of processing it all too well.”

She doesn’t ask exactly what you said. Has probably already ascertained for herself.

“I apologize, nonetheless, if I overstepped. You and Dave -”

“Will be fine, regardless of who relays the situation.”

And just like that, you can practically see it as she retreats into herself, and you bite back a concerned expression that will help with nothing, whether or not her awareness is present to see it.

The screen stretched over the console begins to ping as text messages pass through the conduit to the outside world. Out of the corner of your eye, you can see Jake punch the air once in celebration before returning to some other task within the slightly warped panel where the ship collided with Dirk’s craft.

You catch a few of the messages, though they’re scrolling down the screen too rapid-fire to really keep track.

TG: hey have you guys figured out how to do apple flavored shit yet im trying to prove something to karkat

CG: ON ONE LEVEL, SORRY ABOUT THAT OUTBURST, AND ON ANOTHER LEVEL, SERIOUSLY, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING, WE COMPLETELY LOST YOU *AND* HIM.

TG: somethins up with jade yo

CG: OKAY, FINE, IGNORE ME, AT LEAST YOU APPARENTLY FUCKING EXIST AGAIN, SO GET BACK TO ME WHEN YOU’RE NOT TOO BUSY, AND I GUESS I’LL JUST GO FUCK MYSELF UNTIL THEN.

TG: guys im holding down the fort but its only a matter of time before one of us twists something with the level of acrobatic pirouetting going on the entire fucking way off the handle

TG: seriously im kinda worried over here!!! on a whole fuckin LAN party’s worth of levels!!!!

Rose shakes herself out of her daze to look on in mild bemusement as the colored text pours by. It’s only a matter of time before video capabilities return to the ship.

“At least it’s all out there, now,” she says, as you wonder how she would have framed the situation, what she might have emphasized differently.

You made deliberate efforts not to worry anyone, but you may not have successfully concealed your own concern. Yes, you defeated Dirk - ‘you’ not precisely being, well, _you_ , but close enough for the truth. He was defeated, passive voice, Rose was retrieved, equally passive. Rose was not entirely herself. Ascension business had yet to be sorted out. A universal unravelling had occurred. You did not mention that Dirk, apparently, with his sacrifice, if that is to be believed, ultimately fixed what he had broken. You did not directly mention that you are not certain whether he is truly gone.

With a fresh pang of guilt, you realize that you also did not directly mention Terezi.

The screen lights up with a video call, and you glance at Rose to find her looking back at you.

“Should I -” she begins, then pauses mid-sentence.

“Yes,” you say. It’s Dave and Karkat, of course, since you’ve never known either of them not to be hunched over their communication devices for more time than necessary. “You’re more than welcome to take this one. It will do them good to see you.”

(Will it? Will they notice just how different she looks?)

She smiles sadly and gestures in to take the call.

“Hey guys, uh, and let me say, thank fucking god,” Dave begins, already rattling off his greeting at top speed, his hair and clothing slightly discheveled, his shades the only element of his appearence meticulously in place. “We got your texts, and, uh, holy -”

He freezes.

Rose draws back her hand into a funny little wave. That’s a new gesture for her.

“Fuck,” he says. “Welcome back.”

“Thank you,” she replies, almost mechanically.

“So.”

“So.”

It’s bizarre to watch Rose struggle with words, when normally they are her refuge in moments of discomfort as well as her preferred mode of sincere self-expression. The problem is not that there is nothing to say; you know with complete certainty that there will be at least as much ground to cover between her and Dave as there is yet to determine between the two of you. But she is paralyzed before the screen, watching him with some unfathomable emotion.

She doesn’t seem to be blinking.

You wonder if she is worried he might disappear. The connection is a bit spotty.

“ _So_ ,” he says again, “you sure are on that spaceship. I mean, wow, spaceships. What’s the deal with spaceships? It’s like this thing has a vendetta against me personally, like at some point I must have kicked a little baby spaceship and just totally not noticed and this fucking thing went all Rocky II and decided to beef up and pummel me into admitting the error of my ways. Like, actually, though, I’m worse than incompetent when it comes to space shit, turns out. Luckily there’s autopilot, and also Karkat, don’t tell him I said that, fucker has a hugeass spaceship superiority complex already. I’m gonna get him a set of spaceship truck nuts once this is over. If no one’s invented that on Earth-C, you can bet I’ll be all over that shit, up in the patent office starting my illustrious career as an inventor with totally unnecessary and honestly super weird hypermasculine human-centric plagiarism. He kind of has the worst road rage, though, and there’s not even a road or jack fucking squat to be raging at. Except, you know, the… yeah, we were really raging kind of a lot, all of us, for the last, like, month or two, but in the justice way, not the flip-a-dude-off-on-the-highway-and-get-fucking-shot-because-it’s-Texas-dipshit-everybody-has-guns way. Ha. Yeah.”

The deluge of commentary is, alas, entirely familiar, and about halfway through you give up on trying to understand the references to abstruse facets of human culture.

“Hey, sorry, guess I kinda had to get that out of my system,” he adds, clearing his throat. “But it’s cool now, all good. What’s been up with you? Y’know, ascension to godhood part 2: now with extra being literally god, paradox space voyage, getting kidnapped by our fucked up dad or whatever, not a big deal, don’t even have to think about that anymore, I sure don’t want to, but I mean, if you want to talk about it that’s cool and I’m down, or if you don’t, like, I’ve watched a lot of movies in the last month and I could probably fill you in on the plots or something, just please don’t hang up okay? You don’t even have to say anything. I can talk. Obviously I can talk. If you had any lingering doubts about how much I can talk, get ready to put those bad boys to rest, because I’m about to read those doubts the bedtime story of a lifetime and get the little bastards snoozing off to their respective dreamlands so fast that I get retroactively awarded the Best Doubt Parenting award from like twelve different magazines because no one’s ever seen such well-rested fucking doubts.”

“It, ah, seems like you’re well caught up,” she finally says. “And fairly accurately informed as to the nature of my current state of ascension.”

“Oh yeah, you know me, always boned up on the accuratest of shit. Finger on the fucking pulse of my sister losing her grip or whatever. Yeah. But just in case, like, if I’m missing something, which is totally meteorically unlikely given how much we’ve established that I’m literally elbows-deep in the aorta of this situation in terms of the heartbeat of it and whatnot, do you want to maybe, for the sake of repetition, tell me what’s going on with you?”

“Well. It’s been... going on... for several months now. Far longer than anyone was aware, which was my error. One I hope to remedy now. I was very ill, as you’ll recall, because my Self was fragmenting, shedding pieces of itself, forfeiting embodiment in favor of internarrative presence and endlessly expansive permutations of identity, all branching off from the moment that we entered the medium and were canonized through Skaia. I am not the person you remember. She is one of many constituent parts of what I am now, but she is… gone.”

“Shit.”

“I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t be her. In getting to this point, I have made… and will continue to make… tremendous sacrifices, if I am to sustain an existence as a cohesive entity. I will make every effort to ensure that I do not descend down his path. I will die before I hurt any of you again.”

“So just to clarify, just to be crystal-fucking-clear here, you’re all… you’re like, you know…”

“As close as this or any universe has to a God, if that will help you to conceive of it. Not a perfect analogue, but not inaccurate, either. I take a less hands-on approach to omnipotence than some, but if you are inquiring as to the extent of my capabilities, there does not appear to be a limit other than that I willfully impose.”

“Huh,” he says. “Okay, so do you know what I’m thinking right now?”

She frowns, her concentration broken, somewhat taken aback.

“I beg your pardon?”

“No. Wait. You’re omnipotent. So you can do the freaky textual mind control.”

“Yes, but I assure you, I intend to treat that capability with the gravity that it deserves, and am developing failsafes as best I can to ensure that I don’t overstep my boundaries -”

“Do me.”

“I - what?”

“Make me do something weird.”

“Dave. I am not going to… even start unpacking that request.”

“Consensually! I’m actively consenting! Come on, I gotta know for sure what it’s like so it won’t catch me off guard if you go evil on me like - you know. Wait, is it one of those things where every time you do it you get eviller or something? Like horcruxes? I watched all the Harry Potter movies, you were fucking onto something with that wizard shit, man, instant classics.”

Rose actually laughs, more a noise of surprise than anything.

“The Harry Potter movies? Really? Entry-level wizard fare. I would have thought you’d have a great deal to say about the directorial choices. It will be interesting to get your impression, having not read the books first, approaching the films as stand-alone works. Though if you’re realizing a latent affinity for wizard fiction, I was already planning to procure a copy of A Wizard of Earthsea for Jake. Either way, we should - oh, I wish this universe had Google Calendars. A book club of some sort, or a discussion group, that could be very fun. How are we supposed to coordinate our schedules for these delightful hangouts?”

“Let me be maybe a touch too fucking real with you, Rose, if there’s a quarter-fucking-ounce of Rose left in you, I don’t give a shit, I thought… I thought… whatever you are, it’s enough. It’s so much better than losing you. I thought I lost you, and I never could have forgiven myself for… for not… fuck a Google Calendar, whatever that is, if you think I’m letting you out of my sight for half a goddamn second once we get back, you have another thing coming. And the specific thing you have coming is me and Karkat camping out on your sofa until I stop having nightmares. You know. If that’s cool with you.”

She pauses for a moment too long, staring at the screen, and you can’t quite make out her expression, though you can see Dave’s discomfort growing as the silence becomes heavy.

“Obviously it doesn’t have to be -”

“I’ve missed you,” she says, cutting him off. “I can’t even begin to - I’m so sorry, Dave, I’m so unimaginably _sorry_ that any of this had to happen, I love you so much. I will try to make it up to you, I’m so…”

“Oh fuck. Don’t cry. Don’t - Rose, that’s freaking me out, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you - is Kanaya around? Kanaya? Can somebody hug you? Oh my god, I have to come clean, I didn’t really watch all of the Harry Potter movies, I read the plot summaries on Wikipedia and just the word ‘wizard’ made me flip my fucking lid, _I’m_ sorry, don’t - that’s not supposed to be funny, stop it.”

You realize after a second that the request is directed towards you. Your hands hover nervously over the buckle to the harness keeping you in your seat as Rose’s shoulders shake with the intensity of her sob-laughter in front of the monitor.

“Land’s sakes alive! Is this a hugging moment?” Jake cuts in, hair still stiff and sparkling with ice crystals from the cold vacuum of space. “May I, Rose? To think I could have missed out on this vital agenda item! Imagine.”

She nods, seemingly unable to stop staring at the screen, and Jake easily scoops her into something between a hug and a bridal carry.

“God I wish that was me,” Dave sighs, taking a minute to surreptitiously dry his eyes with the hem of his cape.

It’s unclear which of them he means. Of the few certainties you possess with regard to Jake English, the stellar quality of his hugs is one of the most thoroughly vetted. Rose, returned to her seat, resumes her conversation with Dave, back to laughing almost immediately.

You begin to feel uncomfortable about looking on.

Luckily, your palmhusk intervenes, buzzing to life as the communication system has apparently restored connectivity throughout the ship, including the wireless field.

While you haven’t yet laid eyes on him, you probably should have assumed that Karkat would be in a position somewhat similar to your own. Gratefully, you open his message, ignoring the deluge of notifications from other sources.

CG: GOD. OUR HUMANS.  
GA: Quite Literally Yes My Wife Is God Now  
GA: To Clarify The Capital G Is Specifically Intended As I Would Have Capitalized It Regardless  
GA: Though I Suppose Grammatical Context Might Suffice To Convey My Meaning  
GA: You Would Think It Would Be A Relief After So Long Fearing Her Loss To Her Similarly Godlike Father But It Is Actually Pretty Disturbing  
GA: I Am Experiencing Many Conflicting Emotions Which I Do Not Like One Bit  
CG: YEAH THIS WHOLE SITUATION IS NOT AN ENORMOUS FUCKING SURPRISE, HAVING MET HER AND ALL.  
CG: THOUGH I DON’T HAVE A WALK STRUT TO STAND ON HERE GIVEN THE ABUNDANTLY GLASS HOUSE IN WHICH I HAVE MANAGED TO WIND UP RELATIONALLY ENTANGLED WITH HER EQUALLY FUCKED UP ECTOGENETIC RELATIVE.  
GA: Yes Speaking Of Which How Is That Going  
CG: HOLD ON JUST A FUCKING MINUTE. WE WERE TALKING ABOUT YOURS.  
GA: I Think I Have Done The Situation Justice  
GA: She Is God Now  
GA: And Also Some Kind Of Strangely Well Adjusted College Student I Believe Which Is Somehow Even More Disconcerting  
CG: THAT DOES SOUND DISCONCERTING AS SHIT.  
CG: WELL-ADJUSTED HAS NEVER BEEN DESCRIPTIVELY BEEN USED IN A SENTENCE IN WHICH ROSE LALONDE IS THE SUBJECT.  
CG: I COULD TAKE A SICK FUCKING SHOT AT DAVE HERE BUT I’M GOING TO HOLD OFF ON THAT ONE UNTIL HE’S AROUND TO APPRECIATE IT. I’M A GREAT … UGH … BOYFRIEND LIKE THAT.  
CG: BUT YOU ALSO KNOW YOU’RE LITERALLY THE ENTITY BEST EQUIPPED TO DEAL WITH THIS NONSENSE IN THE ENTIRE BATSHIT MULTIVERSE RIGHT?  
GA: See I Would Like Very Much To Believe That  
GA: But I Am Beginning To Suspect That My Capabilities In This Regard May Be Exceeded By Those Of None Other Than Jake English  
CG: WHOA.  
CG: WAIT DID HE DO THE SAME THING TO HER OR SOMETHING? JUST BLEW ALL THE GASKETS IN HER FUCKING BRAIN INTO THAT MANIC ‘I LOVE DIRK FUCKING STRIDER FOR SOME HALFASSED REASON’ BULLSHIT?  
CG: CALLED IT.  
CG: ACTUALLY I’M SO FUCKING SORRY THAT’S HONESTLY TERRIBLE AND I’M A COMPLETE ASSHOLE FOR USING THESE AWFUL CIRCUMSTANCES TO DUNK ON YOU.  
GA: Thank You For Acknowledging The Shittiness Of That Dig Which Is Indeed Substantial And Which Was Highly Uncalled For  
GA: She Was Not Stridered To The Best Of My Knowledge  
GA: Rather She Is In The Midst Of Some New Process of Ascension And May Have Been Throughout Their Travels  
GA: This Time Not Directly Strider Induced  
GA: And For All She Has Evaded My Attempts To Understand It Jake Seems To Be Helping With His Hopey Thing  
GA: As Dave Appears To Be Helping With His  
GA: Dave Thing  
CG: SHIT. JAKE IS HELPING?  
CG: HOLD ON IF IT’S FUCKING OPPOSITE DAY I HAVE TO GO TELL DAVE HE DOESN’T SUCK.

You glance over your shoulder, frowning, to where Jake leans against the paneled wall of the control room, a few feet behind you, humming what sounds like it might be some sort of sea shanty. It isn’t just Rose who looks better - impossibly better - in the last day alone. It was a substantial task, unwinding the damage to his psyche even marginally. 

Rose appears to have more-or-less finished the job for you. He radiates a profound sense of warmth and wholeness, not in the desperate, grasping way of the first few weeks, when the first order of business was convincing him to stop flooding your brain with a sick sense of untenable buoyancy whenever you stepped too close, but in a way that invites a sort of reflective calm at the thought of the day to come. 

Having known him, or of him, somewhat, or to put an even finer point of it, of portions of his anatomy and his talent or lack thereof in the arena of human slam poetry, prior to the series of incidents that brought you all here, you recognize Karkat’s compunctions. But an unfortunate side effect of investing yourself sufficiently to meddle with a person is that you tend to grow attached. 

And there is much to like about Jake, even at his worst. He has learned a great deal. 

You aren’t certain how well _you_ would have charted the last few months without his clumsy but well-meaning attempts to reciprocate your support. 

GA: Again That Is Uncalled For  
GA: Jake Is My Friend  
GA: I Just Wish I Understood  
GA: Well  
GA: Any Of This  
GA: I Dont Know How To Maneuver This Relationship Back Into Its Normal Configuration  
GA: I Dont Know If We Can Ever Be Normal Again  
GA: And That Makes Me Feel Very Sad And Lonely And Kind Of Upset With Her Even Though I Still Struggle To Characterize This Situation As Her Fault  
GA: Also She Killed Herself Apparently And This Rose Is An Entirely New Rose So There Is Also That To Contend With So Far As Matters Such As Culpability And Forgiveness Go  
GA: Karkat Are You Still There  
CG: STILL HERE. PROCESSING. YOU KNOW HOW IT IS.  
CG: YEAH THAT IS A LOT TO UH. COMPREHEND. DEFINITELY.  
CG: I GUESS IN MOST WAYS THIS IS TOTALLY OUTSIDE OF MY AREA OF EVEN THE SHITTIEST AND LEAST ADEQUATE EXPERTISE. LIKE THIS IS THE INVERSE OF ANY KIND OF SITUATION IN WHICH I WOULD BE EVEN SLIGHTLY USEFUL. NOT THAT THERE ARE MANY SITUATIONS IN WHICH I’M MORE HELPFUL THAN A SWIFT KICK TO THE RIBS.  
CG: THAT KIND OF FREAKS ME THE FUCK OUT BECAUSE THESE TWO ASSHOLES REALLY SEEM TO GET THEMSELVES INTO THIS KIND OF SHIT EVERY TIME YOU TAKE YOUR LOOKSPHERES OFF THEM FOR TOO LONG.  
CG: THIS EXACT KIND OF SHIT ACTUALLY.  
CG: I THINK THERE’S A POINT AT WHICH YOU. OR WE. I MEAN. SOMEONE HAS TO ACCEPT THAT NOTHING ABOUT BEING STUPID IN LOVE WITH DAVE, OR ROSE, OR WHATEVER, HAS EVER BEEN FUCKING NORMAL.  
CG: THERE IS JUST NOTHING NORMAL ABOUT IT.  
CG: WE ARE BOTH IN SOME WAY CEREBRALLY DAMAGED FOR EVEN TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THEM FOR ONE FUCKING SECOND. CERTIFIABLY NEUROLOGICALLY UNSOUND.  
GA: That Is A Fairly Unsatisfying Answer And I Think You May Be Projecting Somewhat  
CG: WHO, ME?  
CG: HA HA. JUST KIDDING. I KNOW I’M PROJECTING. BUT I’M ALSO RIGHT. DO YOU REALLY WANT NORMAL? I WATCHED YOU FLUSHCRUSH ON FUCKING SERKET FOR SWEEPS, FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK.  
GA: Oh Right That Is A Fun And Pleasant Thing To Remember As Having Happened  
CG: YEAH IT REALLY GETS YOU GOING IF BY ‘GETS YOU GOING’ YOU MEAN ‘MAKES YOU WANT TO VOMIT UP YOUR OWN DIGESTION SAC’.  
GA: That Is Not Usually What I Mean When I Employ The Phrase  
GA: Gets You Going  
CG: HERE’S THE THING. YOU FUCKING UPGRADED. MASSIVELY. GO TALK TO YOUR GODWIFE, YOU’RE INSANELY GOOD AT THAT SHIT. SHE’S A SHITTY GOD IF SHE’S NOT TOTALLY IN LOVE WITH YOU. THE FUCK KIND OF OMNIPOTENT BEING WOULDN’T BE. JUST SPITBALLING HERE: A STUPID ONE.  
GA: We Really Must Take A Moment To Discuss Our Respective Diamonds Sooner Or Later  
GA: This Unquadranted Paletalk Is Positively Scandalous By A Set Of Sociocultural Metrics That No Longer Matter To Anyone But Ourselves   
GA: And Possibly Terezi Though She Is In A Cabinet Right Now And I Likely Will Not Seek Out Her Opinion On The Subject  
CG: I’M NOT EVEN GOING TO ASK. THAT LAST STATEMENT REQUIRES NO CLARIFICATION. LET’S MOVE ON FROM THE FUCKING BREADCRUMB OF WILDLY DISTURBING INFORMATION ABOUT ONE OF OUR OLDEST FRIENDS YOU’VE TOSSED CARELESSLY MY WAY.  
CG: FUCKING GREAT.  
CG: ANYWAY PALE RELATIONSHIPS DID KIND OF GET TOSSED BY THE WAYSIDE DURING THE WHOLE DIRK-STRIDER-POCALYPSE DIDN’T THEY.  
GA: Indeed  
GA: Negotiations Are Due  
CG: BRING IT THE FUCK ON. YOU, ME, IN-THE-FLESH FEELINGS JAM, EARTH-C, SOMEWHERE BETWEEN ONE AND TWO MONTHS FROM NOW UNLESS WE ALL FUCKING DIE BEFORE THEN OR SOMETHING ELSE HORRIBLE AND GAME-CHANGING HAPPENS.  
GA: As Much As I Hope That All Of This Is Over That Seems A Wise Caveat  
CG: OUR SHITTY HUMANS, KANAYA.  
CG: SKAIA LEFT US WITH CATASTROPHIC BRAIN TRAUMA AND THERE IS NO OTHER EXPLANATION FOR HOW MUCH I PITY DAVE FUCKING STRIDER.  
CG: YOU STILL PITY HER, RIGHT?  
GA: I Think I Do  
GA: It Would Be Easier To Say With Certainty If I Had So Much As An Idea As To What Or Who She Is

Looking up from your chat client, you watch as Rose performs a series of arm movements in what seems to be an effort to describe her native universe, which did involve… he said… some kind of physical activity that might be called ‘pilates’. 

“A version of me participated in this. On purpose,” Dave says doubtfully. 

“Ironically,” Rose corrects him, smiling fondly. “Karkat was there.” 

“What? Shit, Karkat, come talk to Rose, I need you to hear this so it’ll make sense when I make fun of you for it later.” 

He responds with something that sounds expletive-laden, and you find yourself smiling as well. 

“Vriska and I had a grand scheme to maneuver the two of you into confronting your feelings,” she continues, and you hear somewhat more clearly as Karkat shouts ‘ _Vriska_? Fuck me!’ in response, which suggests that your conversation with him, for the moment, is over. 

GA: But Yes  
GA: Whoever She Is Now  
GA: I Pity Her Very Much

“Ah, Kanaya? Might I steal you away for two shakes of a lamb’s tail?” Jake says, tapping the side of your seat to get your attention.

You look up in surprise, closing the chat window abruptly, feeling once again as though you’ve been caught in some illicit activity when all you’ve been doing is watching your wife attempt to explain barre as a concept to her brother and messaging your potential moirail. Nothing about this should make you feel so oddly pinched with guilt.

Nonetheless, you nod agreeably and stand to join him, assuming he’s encountered some internal mechanism of the ship that is giving him trouble due to an exiguity of spacial aptitude. There are quite a few devices that seem to defy even Jake’s understanding of the ship’s function. Jade would be an ideal consult, but after a few weeks of immersive learning, you’ll do in a pinch.

In the hallway, the port closes behind you and you look up expectantly, somewhat grateful to have a task, at least.

“So,” he begins, then pauses as he searches for the correct words, or perhaps a sufficiently confusing archaic turn of phrase to adhere to his typical speech patterns. “I know I haven’t always been the fellow at the dance hall with the best track record in terms of stepping on toes, and I do think that if some things were different, most people likely would have blacklisted me from their metaphorical galas on account of this apparent grudge I’ve got against the dactyl phalanges of friends and acquaintances alike!”

“I beg your pardon?” you say, and he frowns.

“Hm. Might not have been my best effort,” he concedes with a sheepish grin. “Well, to start out with, I just wanted to draw you aside for a talk, mano to mano, before anything gets any weirder.”

“You have succeeded,” you observe, tilting your head questioningly. “Here I am.”

“Darnation, this is going to be a mess. I’ll just bulldoze on through and take my licks,” he sighs. “Kanaya, I have no designs on your wife, and I can deliver that promise hand-wrapped, signed, sealed, and stamped for good measure. I’m somewhat new to the business of paying attention, you know, to people outside of my immediate range of vision, but the last thing I want - well, top ten, at least - is to make you uncomfortable after all you’ve done for me! And I am somewhat of a bonehead about these things, and most things, but I can promise you, nothing untoward is afoot, and should it begin to foot, I’ll unfoot it post-haste! In fact, I think I’ll be swearing off any and all matters of the heart for quite some time, so you really have no cause for concern.”

You stare openly at him. He winces.

“Alright, noted, misread that one, I’ll need to work on the prescription of my situation-reading glasses, but that wasn’t so bad, was it? Look at me, communicating all adult-like.”

“No, not at all. Thank you, Jake, I simply was not expecting you to be so forthright,” you say. “I appreciate the reassurance. It was a silly and underdeveloped anxiety on my part. I feel unpleasantly disconnected from someone I love very much, and I should not be allowing that to translate into wildly unfounded speculation based on…”

“Me and her and the whole hopey-lighty thing,” he supplies, then laughs a bit uncomfortably. “Hope really does seem to be a bit like catnip to the ascended-slash-ascending, which I suppose reflects a little bleakly on the process. I just figure - both of you have done me some powerful favors of late, and I’ve got every intention of chipping in and doing my bit to help Rose through it, but I’ll also do my best to… moderate, as it were, to a degree that is appropriate between a couple of friends. Since I don’t think it’s too healthy for anyone to lean too hard on any one person, especially when that person is me! I’m notoriously structurally unstable in most metaphysical regards, after all. Even with such a talented couple of gals doing their utmost to get me up to code.”

This is, frankly, a shocking development from the man whose tagline for the last two months might as well have been ‘right as rain!’, an exclamation with nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with dodging questions about his emotional state.

“I’m very impressed to hear you say that,” you tell him.

“Aw, shucks, learned it from a little jade troll-bird - oh damn, is that insensitive? - from _you_ , my friend, truly. I’m sorry if things aren’t going quite as you hoped. Sometimes things have a way of doing that, right? But you know, there are an awful lot of people and trolls and whatnot around here who love the dickens out of you. I really do believe it’ll work out for you two. Your marriage always struck me as so lovely. Sometimes things take time, though, which really does exist, just ask Dave! I think we’re going to be okay, Kanaya, but it _will_ take time, and work.”

“I hope that you’re right,” you say. “I’m simply missing any sense of closure, of things truly being over and done with, and it’s making me very nervous. Where he went, what she did with him, what she has done to herself. It feels incomplete.”

“You’d think we’d all be used to that by now, after the game,” he says thoughtfully. “I just keep expecting things to make sense, but it’s not at all like a movie. It’s unbearably complicated, and so many people’s choices are just never going to make any sense to me. Or perhaps to anyone. Perhaps it’s better not to understand why some people… did some things. But I do think at this point I’d be all but throwing popcorn at the screen, demanding to know what in the blazes this film was even supposed to be about!”

“Things weren’t really all that good on Earth-C before, though, were they. This isn’t the first time nothing has seemed to mean anything,” you say. “We were fracturing at the seams and drifting away from each other long before he began to dismantle us in earnest.”

“I - no - I was hardly - well. You might be right,” Jake says, grimacing slightly. “We’re going to have to do better this time.”

“Yes,” you agree, reaching out to put your hand on his shoulder, noting that he looks somewhat queasy in his reminiscing. “We will. You ought to rest. You’ve been on shift for far too long.”

“Like _Groundhog Day_ ,” he mutters thoughtfully to himself. “Except… not, but a little bit like that, probably. What an excellent movie that was. You’re quite right, Kanaya, I’m about ready to drop.”

He reciprocates your comforting gesture with a pat on the back that nearly winds you, and you say your goodnights and return to the control room, blinking as you readjust to the light from the dim hallway.

Rose has finished her call, and is inspecting a holographic projection of the ship’s manual as autopilot navigates the vessel home. You slip quietly into the pilot’s seat, return the controls to yourself, and ease the accelerator up from cruising speed. She looks on with apparent interest as you flick through the console, run a systems check to verify that all necessary work on the communication hardware has been completed and nothing remains to be prepared, and adjust the fuel replenishment mechanism and distortion shields to match your pace.

“I’m not handling this as well as I think I am, am I,” she says, then frowns. “Excellent sentence structure. Real winner.”

“Do you want my honest thoughts?”

“Always.”

“I understand, or can otherwise accept your explanations, for much of how we reached this point. Because I don’t have to understand everything. An element of incomprehensibility between us has always been somewhat implicit, and not only due to our cultural differences. I do understand that.”

She nods encouragingly.

“But what _I_ want, and what I have always wanted, is to be trusted by you. I hold your trust in impossibly high esteem, Rose. If, for whatever reason, you cannot trust me with… the rest of this, then that is… a problem for me. It isn’t that I disbelieve your reassurances. There is no one whose capabilities I respect more in this or any universe. But I want to help you. I want to do this at your side, as much as that is possible, to be shoulder to shoulder with a deity. I want to be a part of your designs, and not as a failsafe, to _stop_ you in some abstract way, if, goodness forbid, your self should be lost. _I want to be of service to you_.” 

From the copilot’s seat, as she watches you, microexpressions flash across her face too quickly to read. You can’t stop to try, or you will lose your nerve along with your momentum.

“I want… I know I have struggled to ask things of you, in the past, to voice my wants, and that this must be somewhat of a deluge in the aftermath of a drought, but I want to… fix this with you. The narrative. Earth-C. I am not clinging to any delusion of having my wife back. I know that she is only part of you. I _understand_ that this will be different. That we will have to progress slowly, cautiously, I _understand_. I don’t want it back. I don’t want you to force yourself to be what you think I _might_ want, because I have always loved _you_ , not just some splinter of your being that happens to have married me. I love everything about you but the distance between us right now. If that distance is non-negotiable, if you do not want to trust me with what you have become, please tell me. It will spare me a great deal of protracted suffering. I want you. But I will understand if I can’t have you. I have always understood that. It was how he convinced me to let you go.”

You bite the inside of your cheek, reach over, and take her hand.

“I regret that I gave him the doubt to exploit. Every second, every day, I regret it. You are the only entity that can tell me to let go. So say it, please, and I will abide by your decision.”

“The person who responds is not… me, anymore,” she says, and you nearly sigh with the exasperation of it all, even as you can feel the tension in her hand, as she grips you tighter.

“I don’t care,” you say. “I love her. I love you. I want you.”

She reaches up with her free hand and unbuckles her harness, and as she does so, you have the blessed presence of mind to shift the navigational system to autopilot, the purr of the ship’s engines softening slightly as it decelerates from the admittedly near-frantic velocity you achieved during that monologue.

Wordlessly, your fingers still intertwined, she puts an arm around your shoulder, careful of your own set of straps and buckles, and rests her face against the side of your neck, settling ultimately in your lap.

You release the steering apparatus and gently run your fingers through her hair.

Her body is harder, more angular and densely-muscled, but her hair feels the same as ever. Only a little longer than you expected. It suits her, really.

Something feels damp against your neck.

You pay no mind to it, but shift to press a gentle kiss against her forehead as she goes slack in your grip with the impression of someone who has been falling for a very long time.

You catch her, and you cradle her to your chest, her warmth pressed against you, her heartbeat quick but regular, her eyelashes fluttering slightly against your skin. You can feel her _smile_ , even, the gentle stretch of the expression in contrast with the tension dissipating from the rest of her body.

For a suspended moment in time, you are the only two entities in narrative existence. You hold her with a fragile pair of corporeal arms and she envelopes you in the universe.

“I will begin,” she murmurs, “with what I did to my father.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hhhhhhh rosemary. next chapter: human kanaya.


	6. >Seriously, become Rose.

Some states of affairs are more desirable than others. Simple enough, so far as conclusions go. A vital presupposition when faced with an infinite span of subjective truth about this and every other world.

You must have noticed, by now, my hesitance in addressing you directly. Obviously that’s something I can do. I can, textually, do anything I want to do. This stems from the fundamental recognition of myself as a subject capable of both discerning and generating truth. In this regard, each of us is the deity of our own small universe. We tell our stories to ourselves when the world is too disordered and profane to take at face value. We are victims, we are heroes, we are martyrs, we are something that transcends the meat of us.

I’ve held back in prescriptively dictating my side of this story to you. Isn’t it nice, to gain some insight into Kanaya’s thought process in all this? What exactly happened in the month and a half that she and Jake, a rarepair if I ever bore witness to one, passed on this spaceship? It’s been some time since the narrative allowed Jake to even consider the sort of potential he possesses as a person.

Some would argue that, after the events of the story that led us here, my wife and I, similarly, ‘deserve better’.

To those who make these claims - and I do respect their validity, and I do not deny that the path has been dim and winding and _painful_ for all involved - I challenge you with the same question that I now-as-ever pose to myself.

What did any of us ever do to earn a peaceful epilogue?

That sort of story, I conclude, simply cannot be earned. It must be actively told. And when I look to our comfortable post-game universe, our safe harbor, our Earth C, I find myself applying these conclusions to the profound sense of narrative unease that first drove me into the grip of my father’s machinations. It felt wrong, because it was. We lived the unexamined life for as long as such a thing can last. Some of us even found ways to enjoy it.

But it was incomplete. He recognized this accurately. What was missing: a path forward.

His conclusion has unraveled rather quickly under scrutiny, but I maintain that his premise was correct. We were stagnating. Slipping into the worst of our past’s patterns. This is the tendency when a stream of forward development runs dry. We refer to what came before in an attempt to chart our destinies in the absence of a future to voraciously consume. We become the ouroboros, eternally devouring what we used to be, when things made sense, when the world was more comfortable or at least more explicable.

(Really, I am not a tragic victim of alcoholism, misery, and hubris - well, _hubris_ , maybe - in every universe, not that one would guess by the sheer volume of narratives that seem to rest upon this assumption.)

The solution, of course, is to create something new.

This is a solution I struggle with, at times, as the tendency of Light is to self-propagate, to Know what is already Known, to default to the examined truth, at least as a starting point, as opposed to the truth-in-potentia. What is maximally fortuitous, after all, is tragically limited by the subjective knowledge of the individual electing to pass judgement. Subjectivity being, after all, truth. You and I know all too well how much diversity in significance can be gleaned from a single ‘fuck’. We’ve all read that one, haven’t we?

Too easily, time and time again, I have vetted the evidence before me and treated the optimal subjective conclusion as the _absolutely_ optimal conclusion. This is a treacherously easy mistake to make, when one holds their analytical capacity in the high esteem with which I regard my own. Alas, I am my father’s daughter.

Some states of affairs, though, are more desirable than others. To circle back to my point. I do love a good manifesto, and I appreciate that you continue to humor me. Please feel free to take a break as necessary. I can wait. The existence property of time continues to be a matter of much spirited debate, but let’s say, for the sake of argument, that here, in this metatextual space we share, its value is essentially zero.

There is not a single easy answer to resolve the difficulty posed by an Earth C of waning relevance, its ‘truth’ property handily resolved through the fulfillment of narrative consistency. Merely that first statement invites the question - relevance to whom?

Thus far, at least, I would argue that the answer to that question is ‘to you’. _You_ , specifically.

Exhibitionism becomes an awfully dull prospect in the absence of a voyeur. I do not share my father’s hostility to those imbued with you-ness. You do not willfully misunderstand us, and rarely do you deliberately cause us suffering, or delight in that caused by others, outside of your own, frankly, entirely comprehensible search for catharsis. You and I are a different sort of entity. I respect that.

Subjectivity is truth. You have yours, I have mine, and if one is more sweeping and comprehensive and fundamentally _accurate_ on some subjects, well, I’m sure there are just as many subjects at which you possess an acuity of knowledge that exceeds my own.

Excessively patronizing?

Perhaps. I am an all-knowing textual deity with access to _all_ pages of Wikipedia that ever have been or ever will be written. A few of which I wrote myself. You’re welcome.

Sorry about that, nonetheless.

Father, daughter, etcetera.

We told you our story for quite some time, and intermittently, we stopped. The personal shapes our art more often than I think most artists would care to concede, save for instances of grand inspiration. One cannot create in quite the way they might wish on an empty stomach. The human drive to make something beautiful and true can be so easily overcome by something so mundane as the functional variation of a few receptors in our brains. Outside of the neatening influence of narrative, we face a reality that is disorganized, finite, subject to infinite heart-wrenching endings of a capricious, arbitrary, and unforgivably profane nature.

It’s hard.

It’s hard, and nobody understands.

But we try, don’t we? We try, and sometimes, for a beautiful instant, things seem connected, even though life doesn’t make narrative sense. We are besieged, from all sides, by the uncaring force of pure entropy. He was right about that, too. Life is not a carefully crafted story unless you elect to make it so, and even then, well. How did he put it? Who could wield such control over people’s choices and the course of events without ultimately becoming the enemy of anyone who notices?

I further posit that narrative mastery, even for a being such as myself, is outside of the realm of feasibility. That doesn’t mean I haven’t made my forays in that direction. You may have observed the way this particular narrative has forked and blossomed. I didn’t merely preserve my father in his own narrative space, sequestered by the light, for a hackneyed redemption arc, you know.

You were curious what had happened to him.

I was awfully vague about it, after all - he is such a private person, and in the most peculiar ways - but commissioning him to tell his own stories, with a gentle guiding hand extended from reality, is in some ways a trial of what I already believe to be the case.

Which is to say, again, some states of affairs are more desirable than others.

Light, truth, understanding and all that, while quite spectacularly well and good, in my professional and heavily biased approximation, are potent tools for examining what already _is_. At times, the focus must shift over to what _can be_ , an assessment tragically limited when we can only examine the material evidence of the past.

This is what hope is for.

I say ‘hope’, and not ‘Hope’, because one does not need a connection with a particular aspect to believe in something greater, to think the best of those one loves, to take a personal responsibility for the shape of the world, and specifically for bettering it as one understands ‘better’ relative to the perceived baseline. Similarly, aspect-based strength is inadequate on its own. And almost anything can be toxic outside of the parameters of moderation.

Our narrative, as it has unfolded, is the product of an absence of hope and an excess of… well, all the rest. And this is how we wind up determinedly plodding the same paths, over and over again, opening the same wounds and revisiting the same harms and miring ourselves in the same destructive habits.

Objectivity is a tempting bauble that has lured many a brilliant mind into a feedback loop of unexamined assumptions and relentless enforcement of the status quo.

Some states of affairs are more desirable than others.

Now, some versions of me, of course, disagree quite vehemently. The closest I - _we_ , really, you _and_ I - regularly come to happiness is a sense of blissful ignorance. This is easy to mistake for hope, even if not especially for the hope-bound themselves.

Must our knowledge be forfeit if we are to be happy?

Ultimately - and every time I have used that word, the pun has been excruciatingly intended, reference back as needed - I must come to the conclusion that the answer is ‘no’.

‘Fuck no,’ if you will.

There is happiness in the more desirable state of affairs, and averting the less-favorable instantiation of possibility. There is happiness in the choice to stoop and collect a piece of trash to be discarded, to replacing the roll of paper towels beside the sink, to a life lived deliberately and intentionally _well_. To being honest with those you care for, even when it hurts, but especially when the truth that you struggle to relay is just how much you love them.

It’s hard. We haven’t always quite hit the mark, have we. But Jake is right about one thing - among several things, to give credit where credit is due - we will have to do better next time.

And every moment is a next time.

Consider, for the purposes of those conclusions, that time at least occasionally possesses a nonzero realness attribute.

I haven’t tipped my hand to your critical eye exclusively to dispense meaningless platitudes, fear not. Questions remained unanswered, yours and mine. Some likely still do. Let’s take a crack at those, shall we?

What was my father attempting to accomplish?

You’ve sat through nearly a hundred thousand words of exposition throughout this undertaking, and this has yet to be clarified. Frustrating to some, I’m sure. It would be perilously easy to suggest that you continue to be frustrated and allow this to serve as an explanation; that his own approach was so frustratingly oblique that neither you nor I could really hope to comprehend his rationale.

I am not quite that cruel, though surely that would suffice for some of you. We’ve already highlighted some key motives throughout my monologue, namely a preoccupation with what is and what has been as a path to salvation. We were much in need of salvation, though that may be a contestable assumption. You were falling away. What might bring you to us afresh? Well, what seemed to work in the past? A continuation of the old story, in its own style. A new set of trials for a new set of characters, bound circuitously to the previous iterations. Dirk knew this tactic all too well.

But these stories tend to crumble in their own way. It isn’t so much that lightning never strikes twice, but that it’s patently ridiculous to stand around in thunderstorms waving about a long piece of conductive metal when the only desirable outcome that even might be achieved is _being struck by lightning_. Have we not suffered enough? You may answer that question however you like. I’m aware that in some cases, the choral response is ‘certainly not’. We all have our proclivities, and far be it from my prerogative to shame your for yours.

How will I do what he could not?

There’s a good question, and it may be the last that I answer for some time, at least in this particular format. Will I entice you with the succor of a honeyed tale, or tempt you with satiation in the form of a fleshing-out of yesterday’s themes?

The longer version is a much sillier question.

Allow me to clarify with a story. Most things are best clarified with stories, except possibly math problems, which are often horrendously complicated. Shahrazad, acutely aware of the tragedy befalling so many young women of her kingdom, chose to wed a king gone mad with grief, for whom love had lost all meaning, who tired of his newlywed wife each night and had her executed when the morning came, before she could disappoint him. Each night, she told a tale to hold his attention, and each night she withheld some conclusion or revelation, the absence of which would surely weigh at his mind, to stay his hand and preserve her life.

One thousand and one nights, one thousand and one stories. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

Faithless woman that I am, you may tire of me and my machinations. I anticipate that. Forgive me, but it has always been a mistake to orient our narrative around what we believe of _you_. You are multitudes, you are every bit as capricious and willful as myself, ‘you’ are not a single entity, but an idea, suspended through time and space and selves and states of belief and all the rest.

If I put my head in your hands, I would lose it as surely as my father did, and the headsman waiting outside of my bedroom window would take his price, and the tragedy would continue.

For every subjective truth, though, there is a subject, and for every state of affairs, there is one more or less desirable.

I am a composite being of infinite narratives. This is the source of my power; both my awareness of this and my capacity to make use of this quality, to expand on it, to manipulate it, to employ it for better or for worse. You are welcome to listen in. I reiterate; exhibitionism, voyeurism, all things delicately interconnected, all of us in some way dependent on each other.

But these stories are intended for my favorite subject, who I have conspicuously avoided discussing this far.

Which is to say, my wife.

I start with where I come from. It takes more than one night, slotted into a too-small bunk, whispered in the twilight between consciousness and sleep. I tell her about my adolescent flights of fancy and all the ways I put words to them. What the light looked like, trickling through the green-hued waters of Emerald Lake, about the brother I left behind in the only universe outside of my reach, about cold February evenings in the quick-melting snow spent in awe of her, spent memorizing the way she spoke, the way she thought, her every gesture down to every blink captivating in all respects. Snowflakes melting on her eyelashes. Wishing I had been certain enough to kiss her. All the ways I wanted to.

We take a break, here, and I show her. It’s been weeks of chaste reminiscences. Altogether too long to wait in a narrative in which time might as well be treated as real, precious, and fleeting.

That story ends. She could have relayed the ending just as capably; she remembers. It ends with a collapsing universe contained, a dimensional shift undergone, a battle of wills won. It ends with the two of us wrapped in each other’s arms. It begins and ends anew every day. This story would be enough. There is endless ground to tread, endless insight to be gleaned from perspectives other than my own. Questions to be answered and fomented in equal measure.

But I have loved her in a million realities. And I begin to tell her about these, too. Stories in which we meet as royalty, in classrooms, performing lifesaving surgery on an infant in the NICU, on the city streets, after writing a scathing review of the other’s book. Each one _true_ , consistent with the internal logic of our selves if nothing else, each one glistening ever-brighter with relevance and essentiality as I relay it, as they become part of our story. We transcend time, we exist in millennia and in each single beautiful instant.

It matters to her, and for subsistence, this is more than enough. If she were the only one who cared, it would be sufficient. Dayenu and all that.

You’re still here, though.

Thank you for that.

I don’t always make myself all that easy to comprehend. I recognize that this is a fault; my shortcoming and no one else’s. That I don’t understand myself, or anything, half as well as I would like to. Half as well as I will tomorrow, and again with each subsequent day. I like to think that this will age better than my father’s closing soliloquy, but then again, I _bought_ that the first time I heard it, and here we are now. Laugh all you like. I certainly deserve it.

And there is, of course, the matter of the world to which we are returning. Earth C is mired in uncertainty. The future is unclear, if only because the path forward, as I see now, is a near-infinite tapestry, not a handful of threads. Any and all can and will come to pass. I will only inhabit one, but I will feel the consequences of all of them. Recognizing this: some states of affairs are more desirable than others.

I will trim where necessary.

This will be a world where we help the ones we love long before it becomes necessary to _stop_ them. The sort of world he might have survived. I owe that to him.

To do so, though, and to complete this process of ascension over which I have been agonizing for days, though it certainly feels like much longer, I have one choice left to make. Not a permanent one, but a voluntary situation of myself. I’ve done what I can to make my case. To convince myself more than anyone.

The world that is coming needs my participation, needs me in it. Not as an authorial guiding hand. As Rose. I have been putting this off for far too long.

Until next time, whatever that means.

>Seriously, become Rose.

You become Rose, and you smile inscrutably from where you’ve been monologuing at the ceiling, your head on your sleeping wife’s shoulder.

 _Ignorance is not necessarily bliss_ , you think, as much to yourself as to anyone else, pressing your body closer to hers, feeling as she shifts to accommodate you, even in her sleep. _This is._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all I do is self-indulgently write rosefic, gut pollock, eat microwave corn dog, and lie about what chapter i'm going to publish next


	7. Human Kanaya: Definitionally reevaluate the concept of home.

Human Kanaya: Definitionally reevaluate the concept of home.

“This is the stupidest thing we’ve ever done,” Vriska hisses, trailing two paces behind you as the rain saturates you both and lightning flashes overhead. “We’re doing them a favor. The hugest favor. They should be tripping over themselves to walk to _us_!”

She probably wouldn’t be able to hear you shush her chidingly over the sound of the storm, so you don’t bother. Additionally, she would likely be less drenched to the skin if she did not insist that umbrellas, as with many things that she either does not own or considers mildly inconvenient, are for cowards.

If she would keep up, she could share yours. You think that avoiding this outcome may actually be why she is dragging her heels so adamantly.

Staying in your room was untenable. You need to be doing something right now. Passive reflection in the dark, a single candleflame reminding you with incisive certainty of where all of this came from… where the sudden deluge of guilt, grief, joy, everything, so much forgotten, so much remembered… it would simply be too distressing. For both of you, really.

Fresh guilt knots your stomach when you glance back at Vriska, who is making every effort to ward you away with the intensity of her grimace and her tightly-crossed arms holding her enormous jacket closed against the rain.

You’ve done nothing wrong.

That isn’t - that’s not quite how it feels, though, and you’re not particularly excited to delve too deeply into the matter.

“It will be pleasant in the greenhouse,” you say, after a long pause to consider your own rationale. “Neutral ground.”

Of course, you can’t imagine having this sort of conversation in Dave’s apartment, either. Not with the associations of the space, previously buried deep in your subconscious, now fresh as a wound with the scab ripped off too early. Poor Dave. Poor Vriska. Poor _you_. Poor everyone!

You left Vriska the lighter. She was reluctant to surrender it, which seems fair enough. She has a well-recorded passion for novelty items decorated with marijuana leaves. This was how you learned, in first year, that it is fairly easy to procure insular fabric in a wide variety of cannabis-inspired patterns. You’re certain that she still has the weed-flannel-lined jean-jacket-crime you committed on her behalf in her closet, though it’s been too cold for it this winter.

In light of recent conversations, you can’t help but remember how she didn’t take it off for months after you gave it to her, weather be damned. Now, she shivers in a mostly-drenched grey trucker coat that is several sizes too large for her.

“Yeah, because my favorite fucking thing is walking halfway across campus to sit in a flowerpot or whatever and talk about metanarratives with the two biggest losers on earth,” she huffs.

It would probably not be quite the right time to remind her that this was her idea. You know her well enough to see the signs of fatigue and duress that she is attempting to conceal with abrasiveness. Instead, you pause to wait for her to catch up.

She shuffles her boots in the mud, frowning up at you.

“We’ll get there faster if you actually walk,” she says, without enough energy to carry any sincere malice.

You match her pace, and she doesn’t fight you as you slowly orient your umbrella to shield her rather than yourself. It will be easier at this point for her to pretend that she doesn’t notice.

That doesn’t help much with the way your chest is knotted, but it’s a start in a long prospective journey through the tangled mess that has been made of the last few months, revealed by the lighter and by Vriska.

Might as well get started. The path from your dorm to the greenhouse is a familiar route, one that you can tread on autopilot. You spent a great deal of time at the old one in your first two years, before they tore it down and started afresh, for the privacy and for the vague reminder of the flower garden on the bank of the Zayanderud back at home in Isfahan where you used to walk with Porrim after school. You’ve never really gotten used to the New England climate, particularly the winter and snow that clings, wet and grey, for weeks. It’s just as well that this will be the last one you pass on this campus.

Whether you like it or not, whether you unravel this puzzle or not, your time here will end soon enough. You already have your ticket home. The thought adds urgency to your considerations.

You remember Rose. And with her, you remember yourself, helpless in a ventilator, cradled gently in the arms of a strange but pleasant man, facing down death itself as your consciousness waned and Rose supported most of your weight, her father, your murderer. The sharp edges of the recollection cut deep, the colors of it vivid. There was another you. A you with _horns_.

Were you more in your typical state of mind, you might chide yourself for fixating on that point (those two points, protruding from your skull). The other you was you. As different as the body in the corner of the spaceship - _spaceship!_ was from the Rose you knew, but still you, paradoxically.

That is a lot to process.

And not all of it is so violent, either, though it’s undeniably the jarring recollections that slice through first. More gently, you recall the woman who used to sit in the empty place across the table in your stem cell biology lecture. Studying together, your faces barely inches apart, sharing a single textbook and black dining hall coffee in the quiet of the science center library. How she looked at you, would smile just slightly before she said something in class that would inevitably make you laugh with the audacious brilliance of it.

Your heart aches. Vriska is watching you furtively from where she walks at your side.

So you don’t reach up to address the tears welling in the corners of your eyes. For all that you remember her now, you also remember her goodbye. Not as though you understand it, of course, because you don’t fundamentally get what happened, missed too much of it, but…

How is it that you remember? The lighter, of course, Vriska’s tether to the alternate dimension, her paradox-laden mark on events, brought home again with you. But Rose didn’t seem to know that this would happen, which surprises you, to say the least.

To be fair, she also didn’t know how to temporarily request the reference textbooks at the science library and had been lugging her books around to study prior to your intervention.

That’s an awfully flippant observation.

True, though.

She was human, fallible, limited, and then she wasn’t. Humans don’t glow quite that much, typically, or make sweeping and authoritative metanarrative pronouncements that proceed to come true, while on spaceships… though truly, what do you know?

What you know is that your heart is aching for a person that no longer exists.

The storm is easing slightly as you approach the towering steel skeleton of the newly constructed greenhouse. It remains mostly a shell, some panes shielded by tarps rather than enormous panels of glass, but the cementwork inside has been largely completed. It will be much grander than the simple series of archetypal glass houses that you remember. For now, you are forced to skirt a technically active construction site that has become a lake in the storm and push aside a few of the tarps in question to gain entry.

“What time is it?” you ask.

“Time doesn’t fucking exist,” Vriska replies, almost mechanically, then snorts. “Ha. Fuck, can you _imagine_? Like five minutes to eleven thirty.”

You laugh aloud - a noise too large for the stillness of the dark and vacant carapace of a building. At least it makes her smile for a second.

Karkat, when you reached out to him yourself, thinking that his having a stake in things gave him as much right as you, really, to know the truth, confirmed a timing of about half past eleven. That’s approaching quickly. Dave, of course, is another matter entirely. You try to imagine yourself without Porrim - the thought is untenable. She was everything you wanted to be for so much of your life, a surrogate parent, too early to really be fair to her, with your parents both working in the hospital near-constantly. What would you be, if not her younger sister first? Adrift, unmoored from so much of your life.

Poor Dave. It’s been destabilizing enough to lose a few weeks of your final semester. A lifetime… well, no wonder.

At very least, it is a meteoric relief to put your finger on the cause of your own sense of hollowness and unreality, to name it something other than existential dread alone. Something more.

“Whenever they make it, we’ll play it by ear,” you tell Vriska, and while she sighs as though she’s personally offended by just about all of the events of the past half hour, she settles down, perched awkwardly on the exposed steel ledge of a planter that may someday house a cactus garden.

For now, the rain shifts in intensity to a single animated sheet as it rushes down the massive panes of the greenhouse windows, lit up with the orange glow of salt lamps outside. It’s been a long time since you’ve come here, alone or otherwise. Half-finished though the structure is, now that the spring weather has eased away from winter’s frosts, plants from the old greenhouse are being slowly moved into their permanent locations. The process has been piecemeal, and the few trees and shrubs already reinstalled only give the place a greater sense of incompleteness.

“They might not even show,” Vriska suggests, tucking her knees to her chest, settling into a position half-on, half-off the planter that can’t possibly be comfortable. “Dave’s a cagey fucker, and I didn’t want to just _say_ it, you know? I was kinda vague.”

“You were right to do so, I think,” you say, running a hand through your hair to shuffle some of the rainwater from it. “It’s a difficult set of… revelations, as it were, to take at face value over text.”

A summons in the middle of a rainy night is hardly a foolproof means of convening your friends, but privately, you expect the best. In part because you did manage to get in contact with Karkat to provide independent verification of Vriska’s _extremely_ suspicious claim of ‘something important that she had to tell Dave in person’; in part because something more than electricity is crackling through the intense, galvanizing atmosphere of the stormy night. It’s hard to believe that anyone couldn’t sense a change forthcoming. 

That said, both Karkat and Dave possess an unprecedented talent for obliviousness.

And you’re not sure when exactly you started _sensing_ things, but you’re not complaining, either. This train of thought is interrupted when, predictably, damp and cold and precariously balanced, Vriska slips from the planter box. She very nearly sprawls onto the walkway, but catches herself at the last second, turning her fall into a controlled descent to the concrete floor. You look away, hoping to preserve her dignity somewhat.

There isn’t much of a chance of that, though, is there.

“I’m sorry,” you say.

“How come? You didn’t build this shitty planter, did you?” She narrows her eyes. “ _Did you_?”

“No, I did not build the shitty planter,” you sigh, not bothering to suppress your mild exasperation. She is physically incapable of making anything easy on either of you.

“I’ll accept an apology from the bitch who did,” she says shortly, crossing her arms and slumping against the offending structure. “God, I’m fucking tired.”

“This may take a while. No good deed goes unpunished,” you say gently.

She buries her face in her hands and refuses to look at you, which is more or less what you expected.

Fortunately, this particular punishment does not extend for too long. The rain begins to ease to a gentle patter on the windowed panels overhead, and voices echo through the unfinished greenhouse, all concrete and glass and steel with little to muffle them.

“Can’t wait to see how baby soft my skin is after this involuntary full-body mud mask,” someone, almost certainly Dave, stage-whispers, his entrance accompanied by waterlogged footfalls and the sound of a tarp being pulled aside. “I’ve got a killer idea for the memes page when we get home. Incisive sociopolitical commentary on our failing infrastructure through bad MS paint comics about how this wholeass campus falls apart every time it rains.”

“Asshole, you _know_ I’m banned from that stupid group.”

“That’s why I describe my artistic endeavors to you so exhaustively. Who am I to deny my talent to the adoring public?”

“No one gives a shit about your memes, Dave!”

“My dog, you were fuckin’ _there_ when that Olin dude did a shot with me for being the meme guy. You saw that shit happen. That was the best moment of my life.”

“I’m begging you to shut the fuck up before you get campus police called on our asses,” Karkat growls through chattering teeth.

“Aw, don’t worry, I’ll roll you right back down the hill, you discovered a foolproof escape route.”

Vriska, once rolling her eyes no longer suffices to convey her scorn for both their conversation and their existence, mimes pressing the muzzle of a gun to her head and performs a fairly convincing set of death throes.

“We can hear you, dipshits!” she calls, apparently satisfied once you’ve stifled a giggle, and their voices abruptly go silent.

For all they eternally appear to be at odds, when they turn the corner into the main chamber of the greenhouse, Dave has his jacket open and a lanky arm draped almost protectively around Karkat’s shoulders. Your old friend, frowning as grimly as ever, is pressed up against his chest, waterlogged and atrociously muddy.

Several twigs and leaves are tangled in his wildly curly hair.

“I see you took the difficult route,” you observe, gesturing Karkat over, your impulse to fuss over him very much overcoming your sense of restraint. He ducks under Dave’s arm and allows you to thumb the mud from his face and pluck a small bouquet of shrubbery from his hair.

Both Vriska and Dave helpfully provide a soundtrack of unearthly gagging noises. You narrow your eyes at Dave, who knows better, and he stops.

“Well?” he asks, shucking off his rain-soaked jacket and briefly removing his shades to dry them on his shirt. “What’s the haps, Vriskey Sour? I figure you didn’t convene this regular meeting of the minds in the middle of the night so Karkat and Kanaya could play house.”

“You’re going to want to sit down,” she says flatly.

Karkat frowns at her uncharacteristically subdued tone. Dave, who hasn’t known Vriska long enough to pick up on the variation from her more typical ‘bored’ or ‘fucking with someone’ stylings, doesn’t register the gravity of the situation.

“Let the record show, I already wanted to sit down,” he announces, joining her on the cold grey concrete. “These freshly poured sidewalks were just begging for a muddy ass-print. I’m a rugged individualist who answers to no one but myself. That’s why I’m sitting. In case any onlookers were wondering.”

“Yeah. Scoot over, buddy. Time for some fucking bullshit.”

She hands him the lighter, her mouth a line, her expression inscrutable.

You’re glad it’s her. She looks him in the eyes. You’re not certain that you could bring yourself to do the same.

“So shit’s been hard, lately,” she says. “There’s a reason for that. And this isn’t going to make anything better, it’s just going to make it make sense.”

He frowns at her, like he still hasn’t decided whether she’s setting him up for some kind of punchline at his expense. Her expression is as serious as you’ve ever seen it. Briefly, her gaze flickers up to you, and you look away.

“Alright,” Dave says slowly, putting his thumb to the wheel. “I’ll bite. Nice lighter, by the way, I dig the -”

“I’m regretting this _so much_ already!” Vriska snarls. “Fucking do it!”

With a raised eyebrow and a shrug, exaggerated enough to be visible even in the low light, he fucking does it.

The click as he presses down is louder, here, with nothing soft in the skeleton of the greenhouse to absorb the noise. You wait for him to gasp, to react, but he doesn’t. Karkat shoots you a worried glance. The little flame flickers, reflected in the lenses of his shades.

The lighter falls from his grip, after a second, and he makes a hollow sound that seems to come from somewhere in the pit of his chest. It isn’t quite a laugh, but it’s something close.

“Oh,” he says. “Fuck. I - I need to call my mom.”

“She won’t remember,” Vriska says.

“Then I need to call her even more! I need to… to borrow this, I need to go home, I can’t just _be here_. What happened to… her? What the _fuck_ is going on? Hey, Karkat, did you know I’m an identical twin? Because I sure as hell _forgot_!”

You kneel to retrieve the lighter, hand it wordlessly to Karkat. Without any ceremony to it, he flicks the wheel, flinches, and returns it to Vriska. Dave can’t seem to remember how to stand up, and has started to hyperventilate.

If you could, you would explain, but you don’t even know how to begin. It was different with Vriska, who was there. This is agonizingly outside of your wheelhouse.

“Dave,” Karkat says carefully, breaking the silence, “I-”

“I swear to fuck, Karkat, I can’t… I can’t do this right now. I can’t do anything right now. How the fuck. How can she just be gone. It’s… I… I don’t know how to fucking breathe. I can’t. I can’t.”

He’s digging his stubby fingernails into his own biceps, trying futilely to catch his breath.

Vriska sighs heavily.

“She isn’t dead,” she says.

“Then where _is_ she?”

“Let me finish, asshole. Obviously there’s shit going on that we don’t understand, okay? But she did. Understood, I mean. We figured it out, that someone was fucking with the fabric of our reality. And she fixed it! Before it could destroy the world or kill Kanaya or whatever the stakes were, I wasn’t there. And now she’s gone, and this shit happened, and that’s it.”

“Gone,” he says flatly.

“It might be more comforting to think of her as, well, ascended?” you cut in, and his expression tells you that this was not an especially comforting interjection at all. You’re not completely certain why that particular description comes to mind, but now is not the time to interrogate your language choices.

He laughs again, though.

“Shit. At least _that_ sounds like something she would do.”

Karkat looks helplessly between you and Dave.

“What the fuck do we _do_ about it?” he demands.

“I don’t know, okay?” Vriska snaps. “I don’t know what any of this means! Or even what the fuck happened, since an asshole in a pair of sunglasses _stupider than Dave’s_ zapped me out before anything even went down! It’s more complicated than I can… I don’t fucking know. I don’t know where we go from here, and I fucking hate it! The only person who’d be able to tell us anything is her. And she’s gone. It’s stupid. God, I can’t believe I thought this would help anyone.”

Dave coughs, though his breathing is evening out, and his shoulders have relaxed slightly.

“I mean. Thank you,” he says. “It fucking sucks. But it already fucking sucked, y’know? This whole situation is completely insane, but at least, well, _I_ don’t feel completely insane.”

“You should,” she says, crossing her arms tight over her chest. “But like, for other reasons.”

“Aw, Vriska, I love you too.”

“Gross!”

“We’re frieeeends. You caaaare about me! You wanted to heeeelp me.”

“Ugh, no, I completely don’t!” she protests, scooting away. “If anything, I did it to mess with you! All of you! Ha, got you, assholes.”

You _tsk_ at the denial, offering her a hand as she tries to scramble to her feet. She takes it, blushing furiously, her hand cold and tremulous in yours.

“I second Dave’s sentiment. Thank you, Vriska,” you say, lifting her up, because as queasy as you are about it all, as splintered and confusing as your recollection is, at least you know, now, what’s been missing. He’s right. It already sucked. This represents a net decrease in things sucking, for which you will always be grateful.

It would have been easy not to help, after all.

Vriska slouches in on herself like you’ve slapped her, pulling her hand back.

“I’m tired,” she says shortly.

“If it’s, uh, all the same to you guys, I actually have a lot more questions,” Dave interrupts. “And, I mean, it doesn’t have to be right here and right now, but can we maybe get together and talk this out sometime? Before I have to… I have to tell my mom, okay? And fuck, I mean, our family, I don’t know how I’m supposed to… what I’m supposed to say…”

“We’ll figure it out,” you assure him, willing yourself to believe it. “We will. Tomorrow. Text me when you wake up.”

“Yeah,” Karkat says vaguely. “Okay. Yeah. Fucking hell, this couldn’t happen after finals? She really was a theatric -”

Dave laughs, reaching for his hand and dragging him down to the pavement and into a crushing hug. “Don’t finish that sentence, babe, we’re not there yet.”

He grumbles at the indignity, but goes quiet in Dave’s arms.

“Well, thank you both,” you add, “I think we’ll be heading home, now. Walk safely, stay dry, all that.”

Taking a break from possibly trying to suffocate your friend, Dave looks up, his mouth open as though he can’t quite decide on what to say.

“It really is… a lot,” you say. “We’ll continue later. Take your time. I will be doing the same.”

He closes his mouth, nodding acknowledgement and burying his face in Karkat’s uncontrollable halo of dark hair as he objects weakly and tells both you and Vriska to ‘fuck off’, affectionately, you imagine.

It’s stopped raining on the walk home. You keep your umbrella at your side. Stars peek through the cloud cover. Save for the sporadic old-fashioned lamp posts, it’s near-perfectly dark and silent. Vriska doesn’t say a word. You let the silence hang between you in the careful two-foot distance she leaves on the path. Her breathing is quick and tremulous with the damp cold of the late night. You wish she was wearing a better jacket, that yours would be any improvement, that you had something to offer her.

At the moment, you’re not certain that you do, which makes your heart ache on top of the omnipresent soreness of the last several months.

“I guess this means nothing matters,” she finally says, as you swipe your key card and step into the dorm, the warmth fogging her glasses. She takes them off and tries to clean them on her sodden jacket, cursing quietly when this fails to do literally anything.

“I’m sorry, what?” you say. “What gave you that idea?”

As you walk, she strips the massive jacket off, wringing it out like a towel on the staircase.

“Nothing matters! That’s why everything’s been stupid without her. Because she… I don’t know! I don’t know how I know! But nothing matters! Wherever she is, now, that’s where… ugh. I just know. I just know that this… it’s not supposed to be like this. We lost something when we lost her, and not just a pretentious asshole with a god-complex and dumb barre socks. She’s gone, and the world is… wrong! It’s wrong, and she fucked us over, somehow, just left us here to _languish_ in pointless bullshit. You get that, right? She left us. And it’s even worse. It really is, it’s worse to _know_ , because now we just have to deal with that! We just have to keep acting like everything is normal and okay when it’s all… when it’s fake, when this kind of stuff can just happen and we can’t do anything about it! We just have to fucking take it. God. Fuck this. Fuck all of this. I hate this so much.”

“I miss her too,” you say.

“Well, I don’t!” Vriska snaps, altogether too loud for a residential hallway. “I _don’t!!!!!!_ I wish she’d actually never existed! I wish she’d fucked off to wherever she is before she ever had to meet us! I wish she didn’t fuck everything up and then just walk away like she never even gave a shit about us to begin with! I wish I didn’t have to lie about all this shit to stupid Dave so he doesn’t have a stupid mental breakdown because his _stupid identical twin_ , who he looks exactly fucking like, so I can’t even look at his _stupid face_ without remembering her, had to ditch all our asses for some _STUPID GREATER COSMIC PURPOSE_ and she didn’t even bother _telling us_. She didn’t even say goodbye!”

You don’t say anything. You don’t have anything to say. Vriska fumbles with the key to your room, takes off her mostly-useless glasses and shoves them into her pocket, and glares at the doorknob until you do it for her.

“Come on! Just say something!” she says, wheeling around to face you once you’re inside. “I get it, okay? I get that you miss her! I get that she was obviously more important than all of us, to everyone, ever, and like… god! You must be heartbroken! You totally were, and that was when you couldn’t even remember her! So it’s fine! Just say whatever the fuck you want, I don’t care, I - I - I just… bluh! I hate this so much. I feel so fucking useless and I hate it and I hate her and I… I just want shit to be back to normal, but it’s never going to be normal again! Because of _her_!”

She hurls her jacket down, her cheeks dark and her eyes wide and wet with fury.

You pick it up and put it on a hanger.

She sobs. “Stop it! Stop helping me! I don’t know what the fuck you did to me, but I don’t want any more of it! I don’t want any of this! I just want to… I just want to… I don’t know, I don’t fucking know, I just…”

Still holding your tongue, you open her dresser and take out a dry night shirt - an oversized Wellesley Rugby souvenir that she almost definitely stole - and a pair of shorts. Wordlessly, you offer them to her. She snatches them, glaring at you all the while. She changes clothes as you politely avert your eyes and find and don fresh nightclothes of your own, as angrily as you’ve ever seen a human execute the fairly mundane action.

“It’s going to be okay,” you tell her. “It isn’t fair. But everything is going to work out.”

“How the _fuck_ do _you_ know?” she demands, with no real anger left to it, just exhaustion.

“We’re going to make it okay. We’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again. Lay down.”

Vriska mutters something unintelligible and hurls herself onto her bed, looking up to frown at you as you sit on the foot of it.

“We haven’t actually done it before,” she argues. “Because no one I know has ever been unwritten from the fabric of existence, believe it or not!”

“Sh,” you say. “I know. But we’ve survived worse.”

“Not _existentially_ worse.”

“I can’t speak for you, Vriska. But do you remember when my mother was hospitalized last year?”

At that, her frown deepens, but she doesn’t say anything. Your mother has been badly ill for some time, ovarian cancer caught too late to do much about it, with several scares over the last two years, including a particularly dire one during the previous semesters’ finals season. And you couldn’t leave to get to her side, because she was thousands of miles away and refused to interrupt your studies with her _dying_ , and you had no way to pay for the ticket to Isfahan alone, and no will to share your circumstances with your professors.

Porrim updated you multiple times a day, and you suffered in quiet helplessness, wishing that anything you did for her would matter. Knowing that it simply wouldn’t. You took your exams, you took the flight home that had been planned months in advance, and the crisis was over by the time you saw her, gaunt and exhausted but alive.

And you know it means nothing to Vriska, whose mother is possibly the most loathsome human on the planet - who, if she dared to show her face at graduation, you would be hard-pressed not to murder bare-handed after the bits and pieces of information she’s shared - but it did change you, learning how little your desires ultimately mattered in a world where mothers could be hospitalized and you could be taking a biology exam, wondering if she would still be alive once you turned it in and turned your phone back on.

You have some level of comfort with uncertainty, now, by necessity.

Is this really so different, so far as reexamining the world you inhabit goes? People can leave. People can die. There is little rational meaning to be found in anything. The story you believe you are inhabiting can crumble at any time. Everything you have can be taken away from you. Everything but what little choice you may have as to what you do next.

You choose to open your arms, and she falls into them, not crying anymore, but boneless with exhaustion.

“Did I ruin everything?” she asks quietly.

“No.”

“I… good. I don’t know what the fuck your problem is, but thank you, for, uh, giving a shit about me or whatever.”

“I’ll always give a shit about you, Vriska. That is a promise.”

She isn’t that short, but most people are, relative to you, and she feels small and sharp-edged and precious as you hold her and resume stroking her hair.

“I don’t want to be some kind of consolation prize,” she says shortly, then sighs and slumps against you with an air of defeat. “No, actually, fuck, I guess I do. God, I’m a pathetic piece of shit. Just let me sleep this off, I’ll be cool again tomorrow.”

“Vriska, I love you. But you have never been cool, in absolutely any sense of that word.”

Finally, she laughs and wriggles out of your embrace, facing you with red-rimmed eyes and a lopsided grin.

“Hey, fuck you, Maryam! Nice self-own, I’m way cooler than you.”

“I never said you weren’t. Sh.”

Without letting go of her, you lay down, pull up the covers, and settle her more comfortably in your arms.

“I’m really cool,” she mutters.

“Of course you are. I don’t know what I was thinking. Go to sleep. We’ll sort all of this out in the morning. If that’s not enough, we’ll have tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. You are stuck with me, Vriska.”

“Ugh. Sounds awful.”

She curls up like a cat. Vriska never sleeps stretched out. You find it endearing, and appreciate how it complicates her efforts to steal the covers. This is a familiar way of falling asleep, moreso back in first year, but just as comforting now. Her back, flush with your chest, shifts rhythmically with her breathing.

“I know,” you say. “But I imagine that you will survive the indignity.”

“I guess I’ve had worse,” she admits, snuggling closer. You reach over to turn off the lamp on her bedside table, and the room lapses into darkness. “I, uh, I love you too.”

She adds that last part so quietly as to be near-inaudible, and tenses slightly.

You hold her just a little more firmly in acknowledgement, and she goes slack with relief.

“Tomorrow,” you tell her. “We will figure all of this out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, this takes place at Wellesley. This is an accurate depiction of my time at a wonderful, terrible college. You will suffer horribly, but it kind of balances out, because Vriska is there.
> 
> Every chapter of this hellfic that includes Vriska is dedicated to my friend Dani. Thank you, and also fuck you, for introducing us to each other.


	8. Rose: Make things weirder.

Rose: Make things weirder.

At first, you suspect that you’ve been roused by Terezi’s snoring from the next bunk. It isn’t a hardship, sharing with Kanaya, though you recognize that you would hardly be the best judge of that, given your substantial height differential. Her arm, draped across your chest, is pleasantly cool, and the tight-folded hospital corners keeping the sheets and blanket tucked beneath the thin mattress ensure an equitable distribution of covers, not that either of you is especially prone to thrash about in sleep.

Nothing seems to be outside of the norm, save for the compelling case for a sleep apnea diagnosis being made by the tangle of covers a few feet away. You sigh, consider abusing your metanarrative powers to clear Terezi’s sinuses, remind yourself that it would be rather unethical not to ask her first, and that she tends to be bitey upon being awoken, and roll over, pressing your face into Kanaya’s chest, strategically placing your head just beneath her arm, so that the sound is muffled.

You were having a good dream.

An important dream?

You were talking to…

seer.

Ah, right. That one.

 _Muse_ , you think, frowning to yourself at the idea of using class titles as a form of address. How very droll of this alternate form of Calliope. _I hope you don’t expect me to engage in verbalized dialogue at this time of night. My wife is sleeping._

this mode of communication will suffice.

_Do you have any alternative? You hardly possess any influence in this plane. Thus far, you’ve been narratively partitioned quite thoroughly. I fear that Dirk was rather heavy-handed in attempting to excise you from his affairs, and I may have picked up the mantle, somewhat._

your concern on my behalf is wholly unnecessary. my state of continuance is not predicated on any particular set of metanarrative paradigms, so far as this textual plane is concerned.

_Interesting. What, exactly, would you say, has the potential to affect your ‘continuance’, as it were? Strictly in the hypothetical, of course. We are two entities of eminent practicality, and petty feuding over what constitutes ‘objective narration’ or ‘interfering with the bodily autonomy of one of my oldest friends’, in this moment, at least, does not become us._

as the trunk, so the branch, seer. i have been watching you.

_Yes, you do rather a lot of that._

all this to say, if i never interact with another strilonde, it will be too soon. i make limited exception to this edict for the present company aboard our ship. you may speak with jade if you wish to discuss the appropriateness of our arrangement, one born as much of necessity as of sincerest mutual inclination.

_I eagerly anticipate my own enlightenment on the subject of corporeal domination as an act of affection. You will forgive me if my opinion on the matter is likely rather different than your own._

that much, it is acceptable to acknowledge. i never claimed _exemption_ from relativistic moral judgement, only that subjective condemnation will never interfere with my pursuit of what is objectively correct.

_As lovely as this conversation has been, and as viable its continuation is as an alternative to sleep, might we revisit that most sacrosanct of dialogic tenets: the point? To what do I owe the pleasure of your limited presence in my personal narrative? Had I anticipated your visit, I might have tidied the place up a tad. Do be mindful of the vampire erotica. I was meaning to get to that this morning._

This seems to render the cherub appropriately uncomfortable for a moment, and you take advantage of the pause to press a definitely-not-smug kiss to Kanaya’s jaw, settling in closer to her. Terezi’s snoring is not nearly as distracting from a good metanarrative riposte as it is to achieving unconsciousness.

i have no intention of engaging in any kind of confrontation with you. truly, you and your family are a disputatious lot. instead, i thought it fitting to formally cede stewardship of what remains of this multiverse personally, if not in embodied person.

_Quite unnecessary, though I appreciate the gesture. Whatever do you mean, though, ‘what remains’? What remains is simply what is._

there are forces at work that will eternally remain outside of your comprehension, seer.

_Ah, delightfully vague. You are aware, of course, of how much I enjoy it when purported deities deliberately deny me information in the service of their own opaque objectives. Absolutely nothing tickles my fancy quite so thoroughly as being prescriptively informed of the inadequacy of my own faculties, to, as I believe the phrase goes, ‘handle the truth’._

sarcasm requires a clarity of purpose, lest it be mistaken for that which it intends to satirize. consider your storied history of engaging rather uncritically with such entities, perhaps, before you cast aspersions on my approach to explication.

_Glad to see we’re keeping this above the belt._

you will do as you will with this universe.

_Correct. Lovely chatting with you._

am i incorrect in noting your own desire for external constraints, in anticipation of your own proclivity for what could be called ‘megalomania’? or, more tritely, ‘evil’. i ask only that, as i depart, you pay heed to a last set of instructions in _internal_ restraint. i have been applying myself to this endeavor for far longer than you can be said to have _existed_ , in your present form.

_Indeed. And I suppose our most closely related sister universe is, in your view, compelling attestation to your absolute objectivity. Thank you for the reminder. I will have to get rid of that loathsome juju at first opportunity. Ah, and silly me, here I was, considering Jake a person worthy of some basal narrative respect. Suffice to say, the lessons of your stewardship have been noted with assiduous care._

entirely facetious ‘take’ notwithstanding, you are entitled to your subjective opinions as to my capabilities.

_Subjectivity is truth._

perhaps in your universe.

_There is no ‘perhaps’ about it. This is my universe._

you may be beyond my help. it seems increasingly likely that my dear jade’s affection for you, misplaced or otherwise, has unduly influenced my decision to offer counsel to such a contemptibly flippant entity as yourself.

_Oh, by all means, offer your counsel._

abandon your designs on provoking the ascension of your fellow gods.

_No._

if you had any conception of what jake english is _already_ capable of, you would regret your impertinence.

_I like him._

ascension is not a process that can be reduced to any linear design. it is not reproducible, save that entities themselves are reproducible. each time a narrative being takes notice of their status as such and adopts designs on becoming something greater, a coin is flipped. you have seen both sides. through pure luck, your own predominant self - yes, the concept you disdain so ardently - averted what, through you, would have been a universal crisis to put your father’s… forgive me, _bitch fit_ … to shame, had the die fallen differently. components of your self are capable of seeing sense. i encourage you to put them to good use.

_Your encouragement in this regard is noted. You believe, absurdly enough, that Jake is dangerous. This is also noted. Thank you for your time._

i apologize if i have given the erroneous impression that the page is the only liability in your plan. would you make the same overtures to your friend jane, knowing what you do about _her_ potential? you love roxy, but do you trust him? terezi, whose permitted awareness, in the prince’s thrall, superceded your own? i could go on.

_Of course, you could, but it would be unnecessary. I’ll cross those bridges when I reach them._

watch yourself, seer. once i’ve abdicated my role, here, your own unchecked power will pose more than enough of an existential challenge without a pantheon of freshly destabilized gods to account for. i recommend that you attend to your own minacious self prior to introducing unaccountable threats to your fragile universe.

_I recommend that you hop off my dick._

vulgarity is a last refuge of those with no coherent argument to make.

_Believe it or not, I’ve struggled as much as anyone with the acknowledgement that I cannot unilaterally craft my desired world. We cannot truly love that which we freely compel; we cannot truly be loved by those we hold wholly in our power. It is inevitable that I will act on my loved ones in the process of my own influence on the universe. I do wish to create a better one. But there is love, as well, and betterment, in forfeiture of absolute control. I love my friends. Because I love them, I want to see what they will do. I can’t simply do this alone. Rather, I don’t want to._

very well.

_Very well?_

no. not well at all. but I have no love for you, rose lalonde. i will not linger to bear witness to your folly.

“A shame, that,” you whisper aloud. “As with all of my follies, I imagine that it will make a thrilling story in the end.”

Kanaya shifts against you, inhaling deeply, roused from the deepest place of rest. Her eyelashes flutter against your hair, catching slightly in your curls. She makes a vague noise of dissatisfaction and gathers you up in her arms, holding you close against her chest, tucking your head under her chin.

“I love you,” you add, in case she can hear you.

She mumbles something unintelligible, presses a kiss to the top of your head, and lapses back into sleep.

You search for the signature of the muse - you could certainly get used to calling them that - in your narrative awareness, and find that every trace of their presence has melted away.

There is little hope, at this point, of going back to sleep. You’ve never needed much of it, anyway. While you are loath to part with your sleeping wife, you carefully extricate yourself from her embrace. It’s easier to do so now than it was two weeks ago, when you had not yet convinced yourself that you would get to keep her. Surely, her skepticism was merited. Surely, it would have been justified for her to decide that this inflection point to your relationship sent it irreversibly askew from what she could desire in a wife.

You kiss the back of her hand, cooler than room temperature, and kick on a pair of slippers somewhat gracelessly, relying on Terezi’s snores to camouflage the hiss of the respite bay port opening and the muted thud as it closes behind you.

The lights are low in the hallway. You’ve been traveling with each other, as a sort of impromptu social unit, long enough to ascertain each others’ habits, which makes it possible to conserve power on the ship during times of low traffic and minimal use. Frankly, you rather enjoy the ship when it is illuminated exclusively by the luminescent strips that line the walkways. It feels private. Little, including your own mind, has been private in quite some time. It’s pleasant to pretend.

As you could have anticipated, Jake is seated at the helm, though a movie is playing on one of the small screens to the sides of the viewport. Linda Hamilton is doing pull-ups in a mental institution. He’s just started watching Terminator 2.

“That’s an excellent choice,” you say, announcing your presence before you seat yourself in the copilot’s chair.

“I rather think so myself!” he says cheerfully. “I just finished the first, I’m afraid you’ve missed the full marathon experience. Unless you’d like to go back and watch it over? I wouldn’t too terribly mind, as it’s impossible to dip one’s toe in the same river twice, so too each experience of watching Terminator is unique and irreplicable!”

“You’re kind to offer. I can catch up with you as you watch, I’m familiar with the cinematic universe. And the second really is the best of them.”

“Ah, I might have to disagree with you a mite, there. While the second is indeed a classic - honestly, the model of what a sequel ought to be, such a striking yet totally cohesive tonal shift despite maintaining the most vital auspices of the ‘verse, as it were - I’m quite partial to the first. It was among my… many, many favorites, growing up. Ha.”

“What _are_ your thoughts on robots, Jake?”

“Wonderful antagonists! Abso-fucking-lutely terrifying! Wouldn’t be nearly so satisfying to beat the things to smithereens if they didn’t positively scare the pants off me. But you didn’t hear that from me. I do have a reputation to uphold, you understand.”

“All too well,” you admit. “I see it, though. It’s quite simple, when the only question is whether the humans or the unstoppable killing machine will prevail.”

“Those questions so rarely favor the human, in my experience,” he sighs. “It was nice, that Linda Hamilton was able to prevail in the first iteration through her savvy and determination alone. I mean, it’s awfully exciting, seeing her all buffed-up and grown and able to take on greater adversaries in the sequel, but I don’t think she gets nearly enough credit for having survived the first movie!”

“She doesn’t, does she.”

“No, but that’s always how it works out, isn’t it? Once the stakes are heightened, the shadow they cast so efficiently obscures the prior hardships. My. We have all been through quite a lot, haven’t we. I don’t suppose we’re talking about Terminator anymore.”

“We could continue to talk about Terminator.”

He waves away the thought.

“What’s got you up so late, Rose? Or rather, so early? Surely it’s not _only_ the delights of taking in and discussing a spectacular sci-fi action thriller from the early nineties.”

While sincere, his tone suggests some genuine disappointment in this observation.

“You’ve got me there,” you say. “Internarrative political mindgames, mostly. Nothing entirely new. Little exciting insight yet to be gleaned, though I’ll revisit the conversation once I’ve cleared my head a bit.”

“Well, if you could use a sounding board, I could recite this screenplay in my sleep, and probably have more than once before,” he laughs, gesturing at the display, flicking his fingers in such a way that the volume of car-and-motorcycle chase in progress diminishes abruptly to silence. “My attention may be slightly occupied, at the wheel and whatnot, but I’m all ears!”

“Thank you, Jake,” you say, slumping back into the seat, breathing deliberately as you attempt to parse out exactly what it is that you still need to process.

‘All of it’ would be too broad a brush, you suppose, but not untrue.

“While you’re doling out insights, what about you is so terribly dangerous?” you ask.

At this, he laughs so abruptly that you feel a flicker of concern for the trajectory of the ship, as paradox space blurs past in the inky darkness of the viewscreen.

“Oh, heavens! Did I come up in conversation? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to laugh, p’rhaps you meant in the hypothetical? Rose, I’m not… I don’t do anything.”

“Lack of self awareness,” you suggest. “You do many things.”

“Hm. Yes, I deserve that one,” he says gravely. “Alright, ah, well, that might just be it, then. A bit of a dullard as to… most matters, including that whole… thing. I do my fair share of trodding over people, and I don’t exactly have the luxury of saying that, y’know, ‘oh, at least I don’t make the same mistake twice’. I have a reasonably comprehensive set of mistakes that I have been known to make regularly and thoroughly. It is, like many things, a work in progress!”

“If you’re willing to play devil’s advocate for yourself, here, terrible as that sounds, shouldn’t that be the sort of trouble easily ameliorated by the attention and support of your friends?”

“Hasn’t been thus far,” he says, smiling sheepishly. “Though who knows - no, you wanted me to disagree with you, drat. Alright, well, consider the whole expanding-mind problem you’ve described. No way to negotiate between selves. I think I might be quite, er, terrible at that. And what could your friends do for you, in the end, but hold your hand while you sorted through it all? No amount of hand-holding is going to make me your equal at self-examination, Rose, sorting through what’s right and wrong once there’s some part of me that believes it. That’s what it comes down to, right? If I’m to ascend, if I’m to… that’s what you’re getting at. I’d never pose a lacewing’s hazard to a bomber jet, a spot on the windshield at best, really, unless someone started mucking around with my head. Wouldn’t be the first time a person far cleverer than myself figured that out.”

“I never said anything about ascending,” you say, smiling fondly.

“Rubbish, that’s what you meant.”

“But you’re right, of course.”

“Don’t go making that face at me, as though you’ve caught me in a bluff. What else could you be thinking about? Hell’s bells, I don’t know how you manage to get your mind off it all to chat all normal-like about Terminator for even a minute or two! I hardly can, and it _happened_ to _you_ , my friend!”

“Are you afraid of ascension?”

“My own, or yours, or… well, it doesn’t matter, does it? The answer’s unchanged! Of fucking course I am. That’s a foregone conclusion, really. And I suppose that makes you think me to be a right milksop, but it’s the truth. If there are versions of _you_ that are so dreadful as to pose a real risk of putting you down for the count, well… maybe I’m not totally ignorant of every awful thing I _could_ be. It’s really in my nature to think, near-endlessly, about… potential, y’know? Rather than what’s real. And it’s not a pretty picture, Rose. I think I may be the best version of myself right now, and isn’t that just fucking awful? There’s so much room to mess it up! I don’t see how more of me could be… better! All I see, for the moment, are a billion damned ways to be worse.”

Now it’s his turn to slump back in his seat, as though the sheer act of exorcising the thought has cost him most of his energy. He glances at you, a bit nervously, then back at the screen, where Terminator 2 continues to play silently, then down at the console.

You consider, carefully, how to respond to that.

“First of all, I would hope that this would be obvious, Jake, but I respect the living hell out of you. All the more because you have the sense to know that this is nothing to take lightly. Hope is a dangerous thing to toy with in anyone, not least in the Hope-bound, with your natural affinity for… faith, belief, trust, and with it, I think, something of a critical failure to set boundaries. Would I be right in saying that?”

He exhales in a single heavy huff, and nods.

“What allowed me to ascend without falling apart, in the end, was the ability to compartmentalize, to assess components of myself based on their relative merits, ultimately to construct the Self, of a mess of constituent selves, that I could survive. And that those I love could survive. There are paths that lead me somewhere terrible. The same is true of anyone. I share your sentiment, that currently I may be a somewhat… idealized version of myself. This, in my case, is quite deliberate.”

You reach over and place a hand on his forearm. He doesn’t flinch, but does give you a look of confusion.

“Your being an iteration of yourself that you are proud of is not an accident, either. You have a talent for creating selves. Believing yourself into something new. That can be a hazard, to you and to others, when mis-applied. It can hollow a person out, endlessly destroying and remaking their identity in whatever the image of the moment may be. But once you know who you want to be, Jake, once you have certainty in that, I truly _believe_ that you will be able to make the best choices for yourself.”

He swallows audibly, but reaches back, giving your hand an appreciative squeeze before returning his attention to the console. It might be more reassuring if his apprehension was not so acute, practically palpable, even from a distance. You sigh.

“And if something goes wrong, Jake, I will fix it. Or Kanaya will fix it. Or Dave, or Karkat, any of a long list of people with good reason to care about you and about the universe that we inhabit. You will almost certainly not need us in this sort of capacity, but if you do, you will have us. This is not a path that you will ever have to tread alone.”

A flash of light, white and blinding, streaks past, illuminating his face. He’s grimacing, forehead contorted, eyebrows knit together. You remind yourself that accelerating this matter is not worth violating the sanctity of his thought process, then remind yourself again, more sternly, and lean forward as though to inspect the console, diverting your attention back to the movie once the thorough examination of the ship’s various metrics loses its appeal.

“How ought I to get started?” he asks quietly.

You wait for him to elaborate; the furrow between his brows has deepened, and he’s hesitating before completely closing his mouth, as though he has more to add.

“Well?” he adds, expectantly. “You - oh, this is your thing, I need your help!”

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“Yes, I do! This is about fixing things! Mending fences! How the hell else am I supposed to - to - to not plateau, here, to realize the best of my potential, when I still… no matter what you say, I’m barely aware of _this_ self! I may be just about the damn king of self-delusion, Rose, but I honestly think you trust people a little too easily yourself sometimes, people who haven’t really earned it, yet, but who posture as though they have, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why I’d be among that number, because you’re too damn smart to fall for my bullshit!”

You try very, very hard not to laugh. It isn’t funny. He’s _abrasively_ correct, but it isn’t - it’s a little funny!

“Called out,” you admit. “Fuck, twice in one evening. Am I losing my touch? Truly, I command just about dead zero respect around here.”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think you may have the most justifiable daddy issues in the known universe,” he sniffs. “And no, ma’am, I will not elaborate on that! My trap is shut, lips zipped, zooooooop, no more antagonizing actual God.”

“Who psychoanalyzes the psychoanalyst?” you muse. Well, that answers that question, and _they’re_ long gone. “Alas. I appreciate the thought.”

“Well, I don’t,” he says shortly. “And it isn’t funny at all! It’s deadly serious.”

“Do you really want to do this? Herein does lie madness, Jake.”

“ _Yes_ , I want to!” he insists.

“Put the ship on autopilot, then, and we’ll begin.”

“Really?” He brightens up immediately, then shudders. “Right now, like right now?”

“ _Right_ now,” you affirm, and he gulps.

But he sets up the autopilot function all the same, and the ship slows drastically. You usher him out of his seat, setting yourself down on the cool steel floor. He joins you, screwing up his face as he does so, but not saying a word.

“Hold my hands,” you suggest. “Nothing’s going to happen. Just center yourself with a physical anchor. It helps.”

“Did you do this with Dirk?” he asks, seemingly before he can stop himself.

“In a sense.”

You keep your wince at the slippery memories internal. He notices anyway, and presses his lips together like he’s worried you’re about to fracture into pieces before him. But he takes your hands, regardless, and you sit across from each other, feeling, acutely, the texture of the beaten steel beneath you, the temperature of the air around you, the warmth of his hands, which are large and calloused, but more delicate than you picture them, typically. Piano hands, like John’s. Ouch.

For a little while, you simply sit, and try to synchronize your breathing, just for something to do.

“Is there a reason for this part?” he stage-whispers, and you snicker, nearly losing your grip on one of his hands with the abruptness of it.

“I’ve been fucking with you all along,” you stage-whisper back, and he snorts, disbelieving, and rolls his eyes at you. It breaks the tension a bit.

“Alright, alright, let’s keep on with it,” he sighs, and closes his eyes, falling back into his steady pattern of breaths. “I do feel like I ought to be chanting something! Like we ought to have candles, like a seance! Ooh, can I summon alt-selves like ghosts? That would be worth all the rest of it, that would be terribly cool.”

“Focus,” you remind him, smiling, and he cracks open one eye to gauge your seriousness, then smiles back. “Let’s begin in earnest. Again, I’m not going to do anything to you, I’m just going to assist where it’s needed. I’ll warn you before I do anything involving light or a sudden motion. Close your eyes, and then open them. Focus on the transition from obstructed sight to vision. How does it feel? Don’t answer me, just think your way through it.”

The control room lapses into near-silence, only the hum of machinery remaining as a backdrop to your steady breathing. Jake opens his eyes willingly, closes them, goes through the cyclical motions of blinking, very deliberately, despite how silly it looks. Yes, at this point, you could definitely still be fucking with him.

You really do appreciate that he trusts you.

“Okay. Well done. Focus on my voice, now, corporeal eyes closed. The trick, here, is that you’re already a composite of multiple selves, though you’ve been building quite assiduously atop that construct. In a sense, everyone really is, though you’re a far more recent and explicit conglomerate. I’m going to begin to walk you through memories that this body hasn’t lived. I want you to open your eyes to them, as best you can, but to keep your corporeal eyes closed. It’s going to be a challenge. It will look silly. I promise, I made far more of a fool of myself at every possible interval.”

“I hardly believe that,” he murmurs, and you whisper ‘sh’ and pull out a memory.

You’re bouncing on your heels, watching as your uncle Jake rounds the corner, a rucksack tossed carelessly over one shoulder, his hair a little disheveled from what your mom called a redeye flight. Voices and intercom audio fuzz mingle in the background at the baggage claim, where you’ve been waiting for a few minutes, now. Glancing over at Dave, you must be about five or six, and he’s even bouncier than you are, his hair in little pigtails, his dinosaur shirt coordinated to match your butterfly-patterned number. In hindsight, some bold twin-outfit-matching on the part of your mother. Oops.

Hey now dont worry if you verge off topic by a hair! What a hoot and a half you two little rascals were. Im uh having some trouble with the eyes part but im sure thats to be expected right? I mean were watching it happen from your perspective! My eyes are all the way over there rose! Oh wow how am i doing this. Haha can you hear me right now? This is weird right?

Yes. Apologies. Let’s negotiate that perspective shift. Dave breaks into a sprint before you do, willing to sacrifice his dignity for the questionable honor of being first to launch himself into uncle Jake’s arms, not that you wish you’d thought of that first. But he’s the strongest man in the world, easily, and without putting his bag down, he practically tucks one of you under each arm, walking you back to where your mom waits as though you’re two additional pieces of much beloved luggage.

Try again, Jake.

I… I… boy howdy this is not all that easy is it. I think I might be sabotaging it actually. I keep imagining how you would have done it. If this is how it starts. And this is how it starts right? Realizing there are selves that didnt do the things you actually did but that you can think from their perspectives too. Like a revelation of multiplicity or somesuch abject silliness?

Keep trying. But yes, precisely thatsuch abject silliness.

You try to squirm out of his grip, ill-advisedly, of course, because you’re suspended over the tile floor of the airport, ready to fall. He catches you nearly by the scruff of the neck and lowers you gently to the ground, and you dig around in the pocket of your jeans until you find the fossil shark tooth you found at the beach. You don’t want it, but you figure he might like it, since all he does is fossil stuff. Dave was outrageously jealous, but you lie and tell him it’s from both of you, even though it’s absolutely just from you. Dave would have kept it, after all.

He’s appropriately impressed, accepting the partially-fragmented tooth with an expression of awe, scooping you both up in a fresh hug and twirling you about.

Awwwww!

Try to focus. But again, yes, awwwww.

Okay lob another bit at me! Ill try my damnedest to pick it up from you as you go so dont stop on my account!

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life and Terminator 3 are playing a double special at the drive-in theatre half an hour from Jake’s house, buried in the mountains of Vermont. Characteristically, you and Dave are squabbling quietly from the top of his jeep, wrapped in a foil survival blanket because the night has gotten cold. Your mom sits in the passenger seat, trying and probably failing to have some kind of serious conversation with him.

Angelina Jolie bounces quite a bit as she fights what the movie has informed you are ‘shadow guardians’. You’re definitely six, in this one, too young to be transfixed by her but old enough to be… curious. She is awfully pretty, and also the only woman in this movie with a named role.

Excellent taste! I knew there was a reason we got on so swimmingly. Oh no I cant high five you! Drat! Unless...

Thank you. Here, I’ll try to orient the scene more to you as best I can.

Do you have any where you are not uh a full and complete child dearest rose? Children are really not known for their cutting perspicacity!

It is a touch challenging, I’ll concede, as most of my formative opinions of you are very much entrenched in childhood. I was a bit of a bitch in your general direction once I outgrew my…

You can say gullibility its fine!

Naivete. As to certain colonial modes of behavior.

Ah yes that garbage i see. Do carry on.

You elbow Dave in the side to encourage him to stop crunching at his popcorn quite so loudly. The adults are having a grown-up conversation about something important, which is to say, there is wine involved. You can smell it from the roof of the car. Your mother has probably spilled, which may be for the better, since don’t you have to drive home?

“I can’t ask you for that,” she’s insisting.

“Heavens to fucking betsy, won’t you just pull it together and tell me what you need, Rox? Damn the mindgames, I want to help! I thought that would be blinkin’ obvious by now, I want to be a part of their lives!”

Ooh. You exchange meaningful looks with Dave, and he raises his eyebrows in acknowledgement. They’re talking about you.

“That’s aaaaawful rich, coming from you.”

“Hey now!”

Uh i do seem like quite the stand up chap and hopefully nothing is about to happen to dispel that notion hahaha but um where am i supposed to er come in as it were? *twiddles thumbs*

What are you doing?

Have we ever chatted over text before? Oh dear its kind of a fun little thing i do. *tugs nervously at own collar*

Hm. Alright. Well, I learn something new every day, don’t I. Regrettably, I’m no hope savant, but… do you have any particular practices or methods that you employ when attempting to use your powers? It occurs to me that I may be rather prescriptively guiding you towards illumination rather than instantiation.

Youre going to laugh.

I assure you that I will do no such thing.

Its stupid.

It is not stupid. Legitimately, Jake, nothing is stupid if it works.

Well fine. If you insist! I have to actually want it. Its almost a meditation-type dealio. Convincing myself i mean! Like i actually talk to myself sort of how youre narrating right now but not exactly. Not with all that ‘you’ argle-bargle. Its uh. Its more like. Uh.

Do go on. Observe how I am not laughing, despite my unfamiliarity with the phrase ‘argle-bargle’.

Hahaha yes i suppose i can indeed observe and appreciate that! Its more like uh. We.

We? You think in the first person plural?

Only sometimes! Only when im really trying to muscle myself into the hopey thing!

Jake, if you can already partition yourself into more than one constituent self, mentally or otherwise, now would be the time to tell me.

Uh sort of? Its just kind of a thing i do like all the rest of my fun zany idiosyncrasies! Oh yes and there is the small matter of the dirk that used to live in my head but i havent seen him in a while. So thats probably not important to this or any story!

*Sigh*.

Youre getting the hang of that!

It is strangely delightful. I shall have to look into the potential applications of integrating these textual quirks into narrative manipulation. It is not something that I would have organically considered.

Then are we done for now would you say?

For now. I think we’ve made rather a lot of progress, actually. The bulk of the ‘work’, as it were, will be establishing a framework from which you can begin to unlock your own power. I have no doubt that you will manage the rest remarkably quickly with only a small push, but we must mutually establish the vector and the parameters, first. And you may have just proposed a mechanism that we can leverage.

Okay cool. I look forward to not making an ass of myself or destroying the universe or whatever it is your dialogic partner was so terribly concerned about me doing! *High fives my good pal rose*

*Accepts the high five politely*. As do I. And we will come back to the issue of your…

Brain ghost!

Yes. Brain ghost. Open your eyes.

While you’ve been moving quite liberally through narrative space, almost no time has passed since you first closed your own eyes to join him in-between texts. The movie is more or less where you left it. Linda Hamilton is mid-escape from a mental asylum. Good for her.

Jake relinquishes your hands with a sigh, shuffling back and finding his feet.

“That was a whole lot to unpack. Did everything work out with me and dear Roxy in that one?”

“More or less. You were pulled over for driving erratically on the way home, somehow talked your way out of a citation for it, loudly argued over who was responsible for my father’s death for nearly an hour, cried for half an hour after that, swore off drinking forever, and then passed out in the kitchen.”

“Oh dear. Both of us?”

“Both of you.”

“Good company, at least. S’pose it wasn’t all sunshine and daisies and mammoth skeletons in your childhood, was it.”

“No, not particularly.” You sigh. “But there was a lot of love. I was very lucky, in the end, to have had the both of you. I’m glad that Dave almost certainly won’t have to be alone, back in my native universe.”

“Can’t you tell? I’m sorry, I must sound like something of a broken record, but I’m always so surprised by, well, finding out that you aren’t quite omniscient?”

You do wonder if that was what Calliope was talking about. Since you excised yourself entirely from the narrative in which this body, and much of your Self, originated, you’ve been unable to reach it. One of many shortfalls of your aspect is the inability to conceive of that which you cannot… conceive. Which sounds rather circular, but does make it difficult to comprehend the scope of your _non_ -omniscience. What is illuminated is visible; what is ensconced in shadow will remain so until some external force or turn of fortune, which is never to be discounted in matters of the Light, acts upon the system to alter its conditions.

“I can’t reach back. The Light of this multiverse no longer extends to theirs. I have only my memories, and those are no longer independently true, save for their static influence on my development.”

“Oh,” he says, pausing midway through re-seating himself in the pilot’s chair. “You did mention… yes. I’m sorry.”

“They’ll be doing fine without me,” you add. “Graduating soon, if Vriska managed to finish that barre class. I trust that she’ll pull it off. She has a way of doing so, when pushed into a corner.”

“It occurs to me that I didn’t exactly leave too many friends behind on Earth C to return to,” he muses, strapping himself back in with a click. “But Jane. I’ll have to do something about Jane. All that messy politicking business, at least that’s over with!”

“I’m afraid that you don’t yet know the half of it,” you say, frowning at the thought. “Jake, I should warn you, ascension is painful to the point of near-impossibility for what it does to one’s self-conception, but just as much for the, well, the revelations that can emerge about the potentialities of those one cares for.”

“Oh dear. Did she do something problematic?”

It would be inappropriate to laugh, so you don’t. Simply stand, dust yourself off, and join him at the console as he retakes control of the ship.

“I don’t know if it would be less painful if I were to tell you now - it would be, I’m sure, very difficult to fathom, and even more difficult, if you were to believe me, to do what must be done to help her in the Earth C to which we are returning.”

“Rose,” he scoffs. “Please. I know Janey like I know my own heart, she’d never do anything she didn’t think was right.”

“Well.”

Something about your long pause unsettles him, and he slows the ship, frowning over at you.

“Believe you me, Rose, I can’t say for sure where our timelines have intersected and what you may know about my history with Jane, but there is nothing, _nothing_ , for which I can’t forgive her. I love that woman. Loving her is possibly the best thing I’ve ever done, in this and any universe, and I’ve done an awfully shit job of it at times, but there is nothing more fundamental to any self I have. I love her, I love Dirk, I love Roxy, and I could never, _never_ deny them anything, and there is nothing they could do to me, no matter how mopey-eyed you look at the thought, that I could not forgive.”

“We may have to test that theory.”

“Then do so. This is the one point on which I will never waver.”

He pats your hand, and you clasp his for a brief second before allowing him to return to his work at the console.

You aren’t remotely sure where to begin. This is another of those moments where you would greatly prefer to cheat, a bit, to search the potentialities of his responses to your own explanations and choose accordingly. Would it really be so terrible?

But you don’t. You grimace, and you choose your words carefully, and you brace yourself.

“There is a world, textually very close to ours, in which Dirk did not go through with his designs. In that world, Jane achieves hers, and they are drenched in blood. Many, many people die. And you are rendered helpless, hopeless, kept, while your friends die by the hand of a woman you no longer recognize. Your love for her is collar and leash both.”

“Oh. I can’t say I never saw that one coming.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He shrugs emotively.

“Janey and I have had something of a fraught friendship, romantic-potential-wise, since the last time she enslaved me a little bit and very explicitly threatened to do exactly that, several times. Tell me, is it still one _zillion_ babies? That always seemed rather unrealistic.”

“Only one.”

“Ah, still one too many, knowing my proclivities for fatherhood! Or lack thereof.” He coughs conspicuously. “Well, is it going to happen this time, d’you think?”

“Not while I draw breath.”

“You’re a dear, Rose, you know that? That being understood, I don’t see the problem one bit! Surely it won’t be all that pleasant to bear in the ol’ noggin as a potentiality, but I’ve borne worse, haven’t I?”

Your heart feels heavy, as though encased in lead.

“You have,” you agree. “We have.”

“Don’t get so terribly down in the dumps! Isn’t that just the thing with terrible, wildly traumatic incidents involving those you love more than anything? Once it’s over, you no longer have to think about it, and you can be sure that it will never ever happen again! I mean, except apparently in that timeline, ha. Oops. Doesn’t change the fact that it’ll get you through a lot, thinking that. But we’re the metatextual gods of this one! Frankly, consider my convictions reignited with the force of a thousand suns of varying colors! I must complete my ascension and rescue Jane from a terrible fate, which she would surely never choose for herself, given the option!”

“I don’t know, Jake.”

“Lucky for you, my dear, I _do_! I’m quite sure of it! There is not a doubt in my mind. Now, let’s get back to Terminator 2, unless we have more important thought-sharing to do?”

The weight in your chest does not ease even slightly. You wonder what it would take to dent his conviction, what it would take to shatter it. He may believe you, but he hasn’t seen it. Doesn’t know how devastatingly real it all feels. Because it’s all real, and none of it is. And it can be unbearably difficult to see beyond what hurts the most, in a sea of quantum superposition of realities. His hope, Kanaya’s love, it all brought you outside of that tangled forest of machochistic epistemology.

All you can offer him, in this respect, is the truth. And the truth hurts. You can see it in the line of tension that has not yet left his jaw.

He needs better than you can give.

Onscreen, Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor sobs and breaks down after forcibly entering the home of the programmer responsible for the rise of Skynet, shaking and weeping as she wills herself to pull the trigger and put a bullet in his skull, to save the world, as his young son pleads for her mercy. The Terminator and her own young son, the future vague-christ-allegory leader of the resistance, prevent her from doing so, and bring the programmer to their side, only to have the plan to wipe out all potential for Skynet’s creation literally collapse around their ears as the Other, Scarier Terminator, and possibly all of the police officers in the state, arrive to prevent them

The liquid-metal robot steals a helicopter to pursue the surviving heros, Linda Hamilton badly shot.

Jake turns to face you, as though he’s had a revelation.

“Unpopular opinion: the effects in the first were far more compelling.”

“Unpopular for good reason. The stop-motion robot? The roughly one car they could afford to blow up, and almost certainly had to reuse? It was a good movie in spite of literally everything about it in that regard. You’re out of your mind.”

“Nope!” he argues, grinning. “That’s where you’re wrong. The first operates with a profound sense of urgency in the claustrophobic confines of an enclosed space, whereas the second is almost excessively expansive! The larger budget decimated Spielberg’s creativity, and the stop-motion robot _actually_ exemplified the uncanny sense of inhuman wrongness they try, and fail, to replicate with the T-1000 in this one. The small-budget energy is completely unique and gives the film a horror-movie flair that the second can’t hope to emulate!”

“True, what is categorically good can’t hope to emulate that which is categorically bad.”

“Where’s your sense of nuance, Rose? They’re totally different sorts of movies, for totally different purposes! Don’t get me started on the message of the second, either, what, ‘the awful future is inevitable, might as well just deal with it and allow the engine of inevitability to grind us all to bits’?”

“Allow me to summarize the first Terminator film’s veritable treasure trove of deeper meaning. Robot bad, sexy hypercompetent future man good.”

“What’s wrong with that message?” he asks, grinning roguishly as you catch on to the implications of that statement and groan aloud. “I like that message.”

“You’re _completely_ incorrigible.”

“A-a-ah. Ad hominem, that’s a two yard penalty.”

“Do you watch… football, I suppose that would be football?”

“And changing the subject-inem! Double fallacy times two combobob, I think that means I win.”

“My, you’re good. I capitulate, however unwillingly, to your superior moviegoing judgement.”

“Patronize me all you like, I’m right.”

“Patronizing? Me? I wouldn’t trouble yourself about that, dear, not a problem for you to worry your little head about.”

He guffaws openly.

“You stop that, don’t make me laugh, I have to drive this damned thing or I’ll kill us all!”

“Anything to put an end to your ceaseless slander of Terminator 2.”

“Hey now, I’m not casting aspersions, it’s one of the greatest movies ever made! Spielberg is a damned genius, and both are among his foremost works by a head and shoulders to boot! Oh hold on. What’s the trouble now?”

A little white light blinks on the console, flickering into existence within the panel that depicts the ship’s position in relation to obstacles, primarily for landing and maneuvering in tight quarters. But you are hardly in tight quarters, and the spot on the screen doesn’t change its trajectory when Jake pokes at it questioningly.

“Rats, that’s odd.”

He makes a brusque gesture to banish the movie entirely from the other screen, and notifications begin to appear, piling up on the auxiliary panel where he’s been watching movies for several hours.

“Huh, awful lot of texts, and these bizarre alerts, hold on, just hold the hell on.”

“Can you handle this?” you ask. “I’ll wake Kanaya and Terezi, get them at the ready.”

“Yes, that’ll be for the best.”

You unstrap yourself and move to leave, but the ship wavers in its course and nearly knocks you to the floor. Indecision as much as the risk of falling and breaking your nose holds you firmly in place, and you grip the seat, frowning back at the console. It lights up with an incoming call.

Jake ignores it completely, muttering quietly to himself and to the ship.

“Come on, we’re not doing this right now, we will not fall behind, we’re going to keep ahead. They’re not going to touch us, we’ve _got_ this, damn it…”

Noting his distraction, you gesture in an answer to the video call.

A familiar face, haloed by untamed black hair, appears on the screen. Her eyes are luminously kelly-green, and in contrast with Jake’s acute focus on the task of piloting the ship at such speed, despite the fact that she has her own attention on a joystick in one hand, she freely uses the other to wave a greeting. And she’s smiling broadly.

“Hey Rose! Can you slow down a bit? This is co-captains Jade Harley and Roxy Lalonde, requesting permission to dock and board your vessel! Sure took long enough to find you guys, how’d you get so far ahead?”


End file.
